Opinion | Close the door to Ukraine’s Nato membership and one could open to end the war
- Kyiv’s resilience shows that it does not need to be a full part of the alliance to remain independent
He said the underlying cause of the conflict was Nato’s enlargement drive since the 1990s to include Ukraine and Georgia, and he maintained that peace could be restored only by removing that cause.
Sachs has been widely respected for decades but differs from mainstream Western media on many issues, including this view of the war.
They argue that Russia started the war in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea, part of Ukraine at the time, and the invasion by Russian troops in 2022 was an escalation of the ongoing conflict.
For years, Nato members were divided about whether to include Ukraine. There were also efforts to try to “neutralise” Ukraine – or ensure it was neither a Nato nor Russian proxy – by finding ways to guarantee its security without making it part of the alliance.
