The Putin war on Ukraine which began on February 24 has gone on for the past seven months and there is no end in sight. It is actually getting to a stage where President Vladimir Putin because of military reverses is openly talking of using nuclear bombs to stop the newly invigorated Ukraine army from throwing out the beleaguered and suffering Russian troops out of Ukraine. The dramatic bombing of the newly constructed bridge linking mainland Russia with the Crimea, a part of Ukraine, which the Russians seized from Ukraine in 2014 and annexed to Russia recently, has raised the tempo of the violence in Ukraine. This bombing of the Crimean Bridge is a personal humiliation for Putin and a national embarrassment for Russia.

The Russian army has also been thrown out of some of the territories they have occupied in the Donbas region which the Russians have declared part of Russia on the basis that the ethnic Russians there want to join  the Russian motherland. This response to the force of irredentism if allowed can unravel the post-Second World War peace of Europe. This is because almost all the countries formerly behind the “Iron curtain “ in Eastern Europe have ethnic nationalities whose main nations  are outside their current countries of location. Thus there are for example Russians in all the Nordic countries of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. There are Hungarians in Slovakia and Ukrainians in Poland and Rumania and Bulgaria. There are Russians in Moldova and Georgia and several Russians in all parts of the former Soviet Union which are now 14 independent states. Western Europe itself has national minorities within existing nation states of Italy where German minorities (Sudtirol) exist and Denmark, Holland, Belgium and France where there are ethnic Germans just as there are ethnic Danes in the Federal Republic of Germany. The Second World War was precipitated by Adolf Hitler’s desire to bring all Germans in Poland, Austria and the then Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia together with the German Reich.

The feeling in Europe is that if Putin is not resisted in Ukraine, he may be tempted to invade on the same pretext of “Russia abroad” other territories in Europe with substantial Russian minorities. History will thus be tragically repeating itself. This is why NATO wants to stop Putin in Ukraine by assisting the country through supply of weapons of defensive nature which will not be used to attack Russia. The problem is that Ukraine may legitimately see attack as a form of defence by attacking military convoys heading from Russian borders into Ukraine. This must have been the reason for Ukraine’s attack on the link bridge between the Crimean peninsula and Russia itself on October 7 which has elicited violent and unrestrained missile attacks on Ukraine particularly on civilian targets all over Ukraine particularly in the capital of Kiev and also several cities in the western part of Ukraine far removed from the centre of military operations in the Donbas region.

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The most dangerous and sinister of these attacks is the attack on Zaporizhzhia where the biggest nuclear power station in Europe is located in Ukraine city currently under Russian occupation. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an agency of the United Nations has raised its red flag of a possible nuclear explosion of the magnitude of the Chernobyl nuclear explosion of April 26, 1986 which led to the death of several people and caused many more to die of cancers caused by radioactive fallout. Despite these warnings by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Gueterres, the Russian president has remained unconcerned on the possibility of an atomic disaster as a result of his missile attacks.

President Putin and some of his top aides have also been threatening to unleash a nuclear attack on Ukraine and in the words of the Ukrainian president “to wipe out his country from the face of the earth”. Apparently, the Russian president may be considering the use of neutron bombs that kill people but will leave most of the country’s infrastructure largely intact. The use of any kind of nuclear bombs has been declared unacceptable by the United States. In fact, President Joe Biden has said this will lead to Armageddon, a total war of nuclear holocaust in which those who will survive it in the words of a former president, J.F. Kennedy, will envy the dead! This has raised the spectre of total war between NATO and Russia. The question to ask is whether two elderly men, Putin who has just turned 70 and Biden 80, will risk the lives of the people of the world over territories in Eastern Ukraine and over their personal egos.

Ukraine must be regretting giving up its nuclear weapons in 1994 as part of the negotiations towards the breakup of the Soviet Union following which Ukraine’s sovereignty was guaranteed by the international community particularly by Europe and the United States. The situation of constant threat of nuclear annihilation of Ukraine is a disincentive to any nuclear weapons state to disarm.

Is there nothing the rest of the world can do to end this war through diplomacy and negotiations knowing fully well that after every war come diplomatic negotiations to end conflicts? Countries around the Black Sea which are maritime neighbours of Russia like Turkey, even though an important member of NATO, should be induced to wave a peace flag to both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr  Zelenskyy the president of Ukraine. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had previously played a significant role in negotiating a provisional agreement between Russia and Ukraine to allow shipment of Ukrainian wheat and vegetable oil to countries particularly in North Africa that were suffering as a result of Russian blockade of Ukraine’s ports. Definitely the Turkish president is the only member of NATO that maintains constant contact with both Putin and Zelenskyy. He should be prevailed upon to help start a peace process. Perhaps America can call on China with which it has strong economic ties despite disagreements over Taiwan to facilitate peace process in Ukraine in a win -win situation for everyone. India also has reasonably strong ties with both the United States and Russia and perhaps under the now moribund Non Aligned Movement, both China and India can rescue the world from a slippery slope to Armageddon. Whatever it will take to have peace in Ukraine will be welcomed by the whole world. Western Europe is suffering because of unprecedented inflation, so also is the Americas particularly Canada and the United States although not on the scale of Europe. Africa, especially North Africa and the rest of the continent that import wheat and vegetable oil from Russia and Ukraine are also seriously affected. The comprehensive economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the West are not only hurting Russia but are hurting the West too. The calculation that these sanctions will lead to the collapse of the Russian economy has not happened. Even though its economy has been hurt, the country has shifted its energy trade to the Asian countries of China and India and the Rouble the Russian currency which crashed initially has rebounded and it is now one of the strongest currencies in the world. Of course, Russia will breathe a sigh of relief if and when its war on Ukraine ends without national humiliation.

The war in Ukraine has now clearly demonstrated how intricately linked the whole global economy is and when humanity hurts a little somewhere, the whole world hurts as well no matter how tangentially. This is the lesson of the war in Ukraine, in which the whole world is feeling the impact, demonstrating the fact that no country is an island sufficient unto itself. When war is raging in any particular part of the world with the possibility of confrontation between global powers, the whole world suffers.