Economist and Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs weighs in on the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war during an interview with The Hill's "Rising."
JEFFREY SACHS: You can't make sense of this, it's a zoo. If I am just hearing now, the plan is to illegally seize Russian assets, well kiss goodbye to America's role in the international monetary system. There are limits to what you can do, but I don't think our members of Congress really understand much about this.
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This is purely money down the drain. If they want to rip up another $61 billion, which is not chump change, they seem intent on doing it but it will mean nothing except more destruction of Ukraine.
If you don't listen to the nonsense in our mainstream media, but listen to your show and others, people would know that this war has destroyed Ukraine. And the longer it continues, the less there will be of Ukraine. It is very simple, if this goes on longer, Russia will capture more territory. If it goes on long enough, Russia will capture Odessa. Kiev, if we continue the way we're doing. This is a Biden project that goes back 10 years now, we'll completely destroy Ukraine. The idea that this is "siding with" Ukraine is absurd. Anyone who really follows events knows that we're not siding with Ukraine, we have paid for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to go to the front lines and die, for more and more territory to be lost.
The most basic point of this war, which is that we overthrew a government in Ukraine in 2014 that wanted neutrality so we could push NATO enlargement was reckless, stupid, and doomed to fail. And it failed. Now Biden is trying to hide the failure to get past November, but the failure is seen on the battleground every day.
If the Republicans play into this, it is unbelievable, shame on them. They are basically on the right side although Biden bludgeons them every day -- you'll be the one to lose Ukraine. The truth of the matter is Biden has been a disaster for Ukraine for a decade. The disaster is there in the graves of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and lost territory. sa
This is a war that never should have happened, it was about NATO enlargement. The Russians said no NATO on our borders. And Americans who were following this, like our CIA director Bill Burns who was then the US Ambassador to Russia in 2008, said no way, this is crazy. The entire Russian political class is against this. But Biden and Obama and Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken just barged ahead, wrecked everything, and now they want another $61 billion to get them past November. It is a disgrace.
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The war began ten years ago when Victoria Nuland not only passed out cookies on the Maidan, but engaged in insurrection to overthrow a government in Ukraine -- pretty stupid. Pretty stupid to have a regime change operation on a country with a 2000 km border with Russia. That's our American foreign policy. That's when this war started. This war didn't start in February 2022, it started in February 2014 with Nuland, Blinken, Sullivan, and Biden -- who was a key person in that whole thing.
The fighting went on for ten years and then in December 2021, Putin said, "Look, stop the NATO enlargement and we can avoid an escalation." I talked to the White House at that point. "No, we don't stop anything." They just thought they had all the cards. We're gonna cut them out of the SWIFT banking system, we're gonna bring their economy to its knees. It was a bunch of nonsense by ignorant people.
And so Putin escalated. He didn't start the war, he escalated the war. Anmoneyd within basically a week, Zelensky said, "OK, OK, OK, we can be neutral." And the Turks mediated negotiations. And then the U.S. government wants to hide all of these facts which are sitting out there for those who know where to find them, the U.S. intervened and told the Ukrainians to keep fighting. We have our senators who say this is the best that money can buy because it is Ukrainians dying not Americans, they're weakening Russia.
Well, they're not weakening Russia but they are killing Ukrainians. This is not responding to Putin's invasion, the war started ten years ago. We keep refusing every offramp to this day.
You hear Putin saying every day, if you listen, he's open to negotiations. And then, these fools in the U.S. government say there's no one to negotiate with.
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This is just narrative, it has destroyed Ukraine, and they just rip up money like there's not tomorrow. So another $61 billion.
Now the latest plan is to take the illegally confiscated assets from Russia and use that.
That will be really great for the international monetary system I'll tell you. These are people who don't think ahead one day. They just improvise day by day. And then they'll find out things don't work so well fo the U.S. dollar as reserve currency or for the U.S. peace in the world. Because these people are acting like clowns, frankly. Day by day not thinking ahead, doubling down on lost gambles. And everything to tell a story so they can get to he election in a way they see fit.
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