SHANGHAI, January 19. /TASS/. EU countries should not fear Russia but the United States because it is the US that threatens to invade Europe, Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University in New York, said.

"There is a great fear of Russia, which, in my view, is historically unjustified and leads Europe to a dependency on the United States, which is absolutely unwarranted," he pointed out during a question-and-answer session at Shanghai-based Fudan University, when asked by TASS to comment on the situation around Greenland and Europe’s geopolitical stance. "I have said to European leaders for years and years, 'You don't have to fear Russia. You have to fear the United States: Russia is not going to invade you, but the United States is going to invade you,'" Sachs added.

In his view, "Europe has two very big structural issues." One of them is that the EU is made up of 27 individual countries. "So every time that they tried to do something, they had to call 27 heads of state. They have very different perspectives, and it's a dysfunctional process. You cannot run a system on a consensus of 27 on anything, especially 27 disparate countries. So Europe is structurally weak in its organization," the analyst elaborated.

The second issue is that Europe does not have its own security architecture but depends overwhelmingly on NATO, led by the US, and the US nuclear umbrella. "This reflects two big mistakes by European leaders for decades," Sachs emphasized, adding that France was currently the only nuclear power in continental Europe.

"I recommend that Europe make its own security arrangements, that Europe and Russia make a collective and indivisible security arrangement, and that France extend the nuclear umbrella to the countries of the European Union, not as a hostility to Russia, but as a deterrent," Sachs went on to say. "I truly believe Russia does not want to threaten Europe, but it does not want to be threatened by the United States," he added.

Greenland issue

Trump has repeatedly stated that Greenland should become part of the United States. Even during his first term as head of state, he offered to buy Greenland, and in March 2025, he expressed confidence that it could be annexed. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller earlier questioned Denmark's right to control the island.

Greenland is part of Denmark as an autonomous territory. In 1951, Washington and Copenhagen, in addition to allied commitments to NATO, signed the Greenland Defense Treaty, under which the United States has committed itself to defending the island from possible aggression.