If we hear more voices like Jeffrey Sachs’s in this piece at Project Syndicate:
Neither side can claim innocence at this point. Rather than trying to pretend that one side is a saint and the other a sinner, everyone should be focused on what it will take to achieve security for both sides and the wider world. History suggests that it is best to keep Russian and NATO forces geographically separated, rather than confronting each other directly across a border. European and global insecurity were at their highest when US and Soviet forces faced off against each other at short range – in Berlin in 1961 and in Cuba in 1962. Under those harrowing, world-threatening circumstances, the construction of the Berlin Wall served as a stabilizer, albeit a deeply tragic one.
Today, our paramount concern should be Ukraine’s sovereignty and peace in Europe and the world, not NATO’s presence in Ukraine, and certainly not a new wall. Ukraine itself would be much safer if NATO stopped its eastward expansion in exchange for Russia’s withdrawal from eastern Ukraine and its demobilization of forces along Ukraine’s border. Diplomacy along these lines, supported by EU and United Nations involvement, is urgently needed.
the world might be able to escape the Ukraine crisis without a catastrophe and without a complete collapse in the world order.
Against that are Germany’s desire for expanded markets and nostalgic American expansionists’ inexplicable attraction to apocalypse.
Assuming the Ukraine crisis can be solved, or at least ignored, there remains the Baltics: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. They are very close to St. Petersburg and Moscow, and they have US/NATO troops in country. Resolving that problem requires an actual NATO withdrawal from a NATO country.
In 1914, Finland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltics, and half of Poland were Russian provinces, and had been for decades or centuries.