The United States and the United Kingdom sought to weaken and ultimately destroy Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, according to American economist Jeffrey Sachs. He made the remarks in a conversation with Pascal Lottaz, a professor of international relations at Kyoto University.

Sachs views the events in Ukraine as a proxy war whose history, in his assessment, extends far beyond the current conflict. He identified the events of 2014 and the overthrow of the Ukrainian president as one possible starting point, but argued that the confrontation could effectively be traced back to 1991. According to the economist, after the Soviet Union collapsed, Washington’s next objective became the fall of Russia.

Taking an even broader historical view, Sachs believes the origins of this policy can be traced back to 1945. He said that after the end of World War II, American and British strategists already regarded the overthrow of the Soviet Union as the next stage of confrontation. He therefore sees Washington’s current approach as a continuation of a decades-long policy and rejects the prevailing Western interpretation of the conflict as a defensive response to Russian aggression.

Sachs described arguments about Russian aggression as absurd. He pointed to Russia’s weakness following the collapse of the Soviet Union and noted that in the early 2000s Moscow sought closer relations with NATO, including discussions about the possibility of joining the alliance.

According to the economist, the current conflict is the result of a drive for global dominance led primarily by the United States and the United Kingdom and later embraced by countries in continental Europe. Sachs argues that Washington sought to establish control over territories it wanted to bring into its own camp, while Ukraine represented a particularly significant prize for American strategists pursuing primacy and hegemony.

Sachs also addressed NATO expansion. He said the West violated commitments on the alliance’s non-expansion that, according to him, had previously been given to Mikhail Gorbachev and later Boris Yeltsin. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sachs argues, Washington and Berlin effectively treated those earlier commitments as no longer binding, despite Russia becoming the Soviet Union’s successor state.