Very trusting, Professor Sank. Russia, China. I want to have power for me. I want to have it. It's so outrageous, so overwhelming. They couldn't do nothing,

so what do they do? There's no way that the Palestinians and the Israelis are ever going to reach peace. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins on Sensitive. Professor, thank you very much for David joining me. Great to be with you. Thank you, peers.

First of all, your reaction to Vladimir Putin winning this election, nobody is surprised. He's fixed it so that he'll always win as long as he runs. But is this free, fair, right,

proper? It's very Russian. This is Russian tradition. I think he's quite popular, in fact. But this is a Russian tradition. It's part of Russian culture. He's a strong leader. And the Russian people expect a strong leader. We have to deal with a strong leader in Russia. The Wall Street Journal recently put you first on its list of Putin's American cheerleaders.

How did you feel

about that? I didn't even see that, so interesting that you tell me. It's not exactly my point. My point has been, for years, let's avoid this war and let's stop the war in Ukraine. It's not a matter of cheerleading. It's a matter of common sense. I go back to this issue more than 30 years. I was an economic advisor to President Gorbachev's team and then President Yeltsin's team, President Kuchma's team in Ukraine. So I've known this landscape for more than 30 years. And my view is that this war was completely avoidable and could have been avoided entirely for years and years and could have been ended in March 2022. But it persists because we don't have a sensible approach.

But isn't the reality that Putin always wanted to get his hands on Ukraine? He's now got his hands on Ukraine by killing a lot of Ukrainians and invading the country illegally, evading a sovereign democratic country illegally. And whatever his protestations about NATO encroachment and so on, this is, of course, exactly why Ukraine wanted to be part of NATO. And that perhaps the biggest mistake Ukraine made was to give up its nuclear weapons.

Well, I think the mistake is that Ukraine should have been a neutral buffer between Russia and NATO. And that's how it started out as an independent state in 1991. The United States had its eye on getting Ukraine into the U.S. orbit already from 1992. Big Brzezinski spelled it out in 1997. Many people thought this was a path to disaster, and it's turned out to be a path to disaster. So it's very sad. It could have been peaceful and neutral and independent. That wasn't good enough for the United States. And I understand completely why Russia wouldn't want NATO on the 2,000-kilometer border of Ukraine and Russia. So it's just very sad, very predictable. George Kennan called it exactly in 1997. Interestingly, our current CIA director, Bill Burns, who was in 2008, the U.S. ambassador to Russia sent back a famous memo called Niet means Niet. No, don't do it. It's not just Putin. It's the entire political class that absolutely rejects Ukraine and NATO. And we should have been prudent, but we're not very prudent. We had our designs and we have walked into a disaster. But more than that, we talked Ukraine into a complete disaster.

I mean, the other way of looking at this is Ukraine wanted to be a sovereign democratic country after the breakup of the Soviet Union. In fact, vast majority of people in Ukraine voted for that. And this was the complete antithesis of how Putin saw the lay of the land. And he thought, no, I'm not having that. I'm going to go and grab Crimea. And I'll grab a load of Ukraine, try it in Georgia. I mean, at what point does he do this stuff where even someone who's trying to be fair-minded about his intentions, like yourself, might think, I wonder if I'm right. And maybe he is just a pathological liar and a homicidal maniac.

Here's the real screw-up by the US was not just pushing NATO, but playing real games and participating in the overthrow of Yanukovych in February 2014. We overthrew a government in the United States played a major role in that. I happened to see some of it firsthand pretty ugly, but pretty standard stuff. This is what the US does when it doesn't like a government or a government standing in the way. It stirs things up. It puts in a lot of money. It funds unrest. It stokes unrest. And it did that in February 2014. That was really the huge mistake. That was a gambit, a typical so-called covert, but not very covert US regime change operation. And it was absolutely the path to the disaster that we're in right now. So I think the main point is you have two sides playing a lot of games, but for the United States to be pushing so hard to Russia's border was absolutely premeditated and stupid, really stupid. It got us into this mess and you could see it coming so clearly for the last 10 years. What is your view of about it? I begged the White House many times. Avoid the war. Stop. Just tell them NATO is not coming. Ukraine will do just fine and they wouldn't do it because this has been a 30-year project of the United States also. This is how it works. This has been a long-standing game announced, explained. Brzezinski laid it all out for us in 1997. So we've seen it. But

what is your... What is your... What is your... Let me ask you that. What is your view of Vladimir

Putin? Well, I think he's very smart, very tough. And I think he says what he means in 2007. He said, don't do this at the Munich Security Conference famously. He said, all right, you went violating what I know to be true, by the way, which was not an inch eastward for NATO, promised by James Baker III and by Hans Dietrich Denscher, two Gorbachev in 1990. I know that for sure, the case. The United States expanded NATO to Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic in the Clinton period and then to seven more countries in 2004, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Romania, Bulgaria. And then 2007, Putin said, stop. All right, stop. No more not to Ukraine. So what does George W. do in 2008 in Bucharest? Of course, what does he do? He says, guarantee Ukraine and Georgia. And this is a Palmerston's playbook from 1853, so we're going to surround Russia in the Black Sea again. Exactly that. Okay, but... I don't interrupt. Just to interrupt, though, I just

asked you what your view of Putin is. And so far, you've just said he's smart and tough. I just told you. He won... Any negatives? Very clearly. Any negatives,

Professor? I believe that the big mistake of both sides is we should talk this out. And now, let me say a word about talking it out. In 2008, when Bucharest happened, European leaders called me, because I'm friends with them, they said, what is your crazy president doing? By the way, some who are in power right now, I won't name names. What is your president doing? Why is he destabilizing things? He promised he wasn't going to push Ukraine. That's what European leaders say in private. They don't say it in public. We avoided the negotiations. Then 2014 came. Sadly, peers, I saw some of it firsthand. It was ugly. The United States should not be funding overthrows of governments. We did. I know it. Okay. There are soon afterwards with the handpicked government, the handpicked by Victoria Newland, we didn't talk then. Then came the Minsk agreements. And then the United States said privately, even though the U.S. Security Council has backed both Minsk one and Minsk two, you don't have to do this. And so with Poroshenko, don't worry about it. Then we heard, of course, Chancellor Merkel say afterwards, yeah, we weren't taking it too seriously, even though Germany and France were the guarantors of that. Then on December 15th, 2021, Putin put it down in a draft U.S.-Russia security agreement. I read it. I called the White House. I said, you know what? You can negotiate on this basis. Avoid the war. No, no, no. There's going to be no war, Mr. Sachs. I said, just tell them that NATO is not going too enlarged. You'll avoid the war. No, we're never going to say that. We have an open-door policy. So what kind of open-door policy? We've had 200 years of the Monroe Doctrine, some open-door policy. No, no, no, Mr. Sachs. Then the war breaks out. Then immediately Zelensky says, okay, okay, we can be neutral. We can be neutral. And negotiations start, as you know, not Cali Bennett, informally the prime minister of Israel and Turkey with its very skilled diplomacy actually flew to Ankara to discuss with the Turkish diplomats what was going on. The U.S. stopped the agreement. Why? Because they thought, we'll win. We can blade Russia. Our sanctions, you know, cutting them out of the banking system, we're going to bring them to their knees. It's a bunch of terrible miscalculations is what it is.

Okay. Listen, a terrible game. I hear what I'm fascinated by, though, is I've asked you to say what you think of Putin and so far, like I say, you've only called him tough and smart. This is a guy that kills his political opponents. This is a guy who... No, what's the... This is a guy who rules his country like in gangsters. I find it... I'm struggling to understand why you can't find any negatives for the guy. He's a

dictator. Because I'm trying to... Because I'm trying to find peace and you don't do it the way that Biden does. Biden said, okay, he's a thug. Biden says he's a crazy SOB. That's real good, Joe. That's really getting us to where we want to go. That's hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians dead. But you don't... Can you not find anything

negative to say about Vladimir Putin?

I don't think that what I say about Putin negative has anything to do with anything. What I'm saying is, as I know...

Well, you're ready to call him smart. You're ready to call him

smart and tough. That's okay. And you know, in...

You're good smart and tough, but you can't find anything better. I wrote a book

about the Cuban Missile Crisis and its aftermath. Kennedy didn't go name calling Khrushchev. He tried to save the world to stop the war. Afterwards, he didn't insult Khrushchev. What he did was sat down with him and negotiated the partial nuclear test ban treaty. We're not in a game. We're not in name calling. We're not in a cage brawl. We're trying to actually not have the world spiral into nuclear war. So it's not that game. The game is sit down and negotiate.