MOSCOW, May 30. /TASS/. Ukraine risks losing its Black Sea coast, including the city of Odessa, unless it agrees to a peace deal right now, Jeffrey Sachs, American economist and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University in New York, said in an interview with TASS.
"If, in fact, the war continues, because essentially Ukraine doesn't make peace, doesn't want to make peace, and [US President Donald] Trump basically falls into line with the prevailing view that the West should continue to fight Russia, my guess is that Ukraine would lose not only a lot more lives, but also a lot more territory in the end. So it could end up being completely defeated, it could end up losing its Black Sea coast, Odessa, and a lot of the rest," he pointed out.
When asked if Ukraine could be divided like Germany had been after World War II, Sachs said: "It depends on how this war ends."
"If the war were to end now, as it should, I think Ukraine would lose some territory. But it would remain with the vast preponderance of its territory," the analyst noted. He believes that in such a case, Ukraine "would have security and it would be neutral and it could recover." "So that's why the war should end right now," he emphasized.
According to the expert, "the bigger risk for Ukraine, for sure, is to continue this war." "I think that Ukraine is on the losing end of the war. The war is in nobody's interest if the peace is based on a legitimate end to the causes of the war in the first place, which include NATO enlargement, for example," Sachs noted.