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Jeffrey Sachs: ‘I Am a Defender of Ukraine’ – NATO Fights to the Last Ukrainian (Transcript)

In this interview, Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins Glenn Diesen to discuss his article “I Am a Defender of Ukraine” and explains why he believes NATO and the West are fighting to the last Ukrainian. Sachs traces the Ukraine war back to NATO expansion, Brzezinski’s “geopolitical pivot” strategy, and the squandered Minsk and Istanbul agreements, while laying out his own four-point peace proposal built on indivisible security, Ukrainian neutrality, and a de facto armistice line. He also criticizes Western media for silencing debate and European leaders for leaving diplomacy in Washington’s hands. Read the full transcript of this interview which was live on October 24, 2026 below:

Introduction: “I Am a Defender of Ukraine”

GLENN DIESEN: (00:00:01 – 00:00:18) Welcome back. Today is October 24th, 2026, and we have the great pleasure of being joined by Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Well, today to discuss an article you wrote with the title, “I Am a Defender of Ukraine.” So thank you for coming on the program.

JEFFREY SACHS: (00:00:19 – 00:07:50) Oh, it’s great to be with you. Yes, indeed. I wrote it in response to a typical editorial saying I’m a Putin apologist. And of course, I’m not an apologist for anybody. I am in favor of peace and ending a slaughter that is useless and in which Ukraine is being used first by the United States for more than 30 years, and now it seems by powers in Europe And that slaughter is doing more damage to Ukraine, of course, than to anybody else.

Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, and Ukraine as a “Geopolitical Pivot”

The idea starting back in the 1990s, but even of course predating that to the era of the Cold War itself, was to use Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia. And Brzezinski, the strategist who was Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor and then leading proponent of American foreign policy and towards a hard line with Russia in the 1990s, gave the term “geopolitical pivot.” To places like Ukraine that the United States would use in its quest for primacy.

He wrote a whole book about this called “The Grand Chessboard,” and the idea was to teach us to think about the world as a chessboard, and there are pawns on that chessboard, and Ukraine was one of the pawns. Geopolitical pivot means a place that is not important in its own right, not a major power, not something that the United States would care about, but a place that the US can use for leverage. And in this case, Ukraine is the lever against Russia.

And Brzezinski famously said that “Russia without Ukraine ceases to be an empire.” And he paraphrased that in many, many places, but what he meant was that Russia would not be a great power without Ukraine, and therefore the United States should view Ukraine as a geopolitical pivot. And he spelled out what that meant. That meant bringing Ukraine into NATO, by the way, whether Ukraine wanted that or not, because for all of the period up until the 2014 coup, the Ukrainian people were against NATO.

So the United States had a double burden, one to get this job done in the face of promises that it had told Russia and extremely strong, clear red lines put down by Russia. And second, against the opposition of the Ukrainian people themselves, which is an extraordinary thing. In other words, Brzezinski was not thinking about Ukrainians. He wasn’t thinking about Ukraine. He was thinking about American great power play against Russia. And he spells it out very explicitly.

But he said that Ukraine should be brought into NATO in 1997. He gave a timetable, which was between 2005 and 2010. And that’s essentially the timeline that the US government followed in declaring in 2008 and forcing the Europeans to agree that Ukraine would become part of NATO. At the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit.

Ukraine as Europe’s Front Line

So all of this is to say, Glenn, that Ukraine was used by the United States and used for more than 30 years. Now Ukraine is used by the Europeans in an utterly ghastly, darkly wrong, and cynical way I think the Europeans either believe or want to believe or want to make us believe that Ukraine is the front line in an inevitable war with Russia, but it should be fought in Ukraine, not in Germany or not in France. So it’s very important to send Ukrainians to their death and only to escalate because the alternative, it is claimed by these miserable European leaders is that if Ukraine goes down, we’re next.

Well, in any event, for me, if I may say so, for you or others to be accused of being against Ukraine for calling for peace puts things exactly upside down. I call for peace because I want to save Ukraine from being used to its death by the United States and Europe. I want this cynical game to end. I want this craziness to end.

Yes, I want an independent, sovereign, secure Ukraine. Where Ukrainians are not dying in vast numbers or freezing to death or suffering from disease because the water systems don’t work. But just to say to Russia, to the Russian government, well, the West can do whatever it wants and you have to stop, rather than saying, let’s negotiate inclusive security So that the underlying drivers that got us into this war, which was the NATO expansion and the failure to implement every possible off-ramp like the Minsk agreements, is recognized and taken off the table so that there is inclusive security, then there can be peace.

But for the West to say that anyone that calls for peace is simply against Ukraine is such a bizarre narrative. Well, all of this is to say I was attacked, as I have been over the years, for being against Ukraine. And I wanted to make very clear, from Ukraine’s independence, I actually volunteered my time to help Ukraine in its early days.