The incoming president of the United States, Donald J. Trump during his recently won election promised to end the Russian war on Ukraine within 24 hours of being in the White House which should be on January 21, 2025. The world waits with bated breath for this magical solution and surprise for this complex conflict. No one expects a sudden end to a conflict that began incrementally from about February and March 2014 when Russia annexed the Black Sea port of Crimea which for hundreds of years had served as the Russian empire’s winter port connection to the world but which had been handed over to Ukraine when the Soviet Empire was dissolved in 1994. As part of a post-Soviet era settlement, it appears the Americans and its NATO allies had given the remnant of the Soviet Empire-Russia, that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe which was previously part of the Warsaw pact but this promise was obeyed in its breach. NATO did not only expand into Eastern Germany, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and into former Soviet territories in the Baltic viz; Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia and now into neutral Sweden and Finland.
It is argued that it is in this situation of Russia feeling it is hemmed in and surrounded that President Vladimir Putin is able to whip up nationalist sentiments in Russia in his war in Ukraine. Putin and many Russians do not see Ukraine as a separate country from their home because some of their former rulers were either Ukrainians or partly Ukrainian. Substantial part of Eastern Ukraine is populated by ethnic Russians that President Putin likes to call “Russia abroad”. This is a dangerous belief by Putin who seems to feel wherever there are Russians must be part of the Russian motherland! The case becomes more complex because it appears substantial portion of Ukrainians who are not ethnic Russians want a separate country of their own.
Much lives have been lost in the war, in fact hundreds of thousands of young men and others have been lost as collateral damage during bombing raids and shelling and many millions of Ukrainians have been scattered all over the world in the USA and Canada and all over Europe and displaced in their own country itself.
The peace plan being touted by Donald Trump and others want to concede the territories already captured by Russia to it which is about a quarter of the country in the East and South East. How would President Zelenskyy sell this to his compatriots without being seen as a traitor? On the other hand, President Vladimir Putin has drawn the red line beyond which he would never allow enemies to cross. It is not even likely he would accept the rump of Ukraine joining NATO. If this is the peace plan Trump wants to ram down the throat of Ukraine, my guess is that the war would continue until the Ukrainians are totally defeated or are made to surrender after the Americans under Trump cuts off their supply of weapons. Would America want to lose face among their allies in Europe and elsewhere where dependence on their commitment would mean nothing especially in such places like Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia and the Middle East?
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This is one of the reasons why outgoing president, Joe Biden as a last minute action allowed the Ukrainian government to start using American long range weapons with about 190 kilometres range to hit the Russian army within Russia something he had said he would not do for months despite President Zelenskyy’s plea. When the first salvo of these weapons were released, President Putin asked his military to respond with a new kind of weapons with multiple warheads just short of nuclear weapons which apparently no anti-missile weapons in the west could intercept. He also said he would use these new weapons against any country that supplies the long range weapons used against Russia to Ukraine. Does he mean he was prepared to attack France, Britain and the United States without precipitating a global nuclear conflict and catastrophe? The world is at this brink and most of us do not know that a mistake in one little corner of Europe can again plunge the world into a global conflagration the cause of which we know nothing of.
Yet, the problem seems so intractable that compromise seems impossible while absolute victory or defeat seems unacceptable to many involved in finding a solution. Meanwhile, the United Nations that was set up for times like this have been rendered impotent by the super powers who prefer to resolve conflicts in which they are involved outside the purview of the United Nations thus reducing the global body to a mere talking shop and international treaties and agreements are reduced to mere chiffon de papier. Even though we in the third world can smugly say we are not directly involved, but the world is a global village. What affects one affects all others. If there were to be war in which the global environment is poisoned through the use of nuclear weapons, in the words of President John F Kennedy “the living will envy the dead” because the environment would have been so poisoned by radioactive fallout that whatever plants or food that survived would not be fit for human consumption and civilization, according to the nuclear scientists, Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer human civilization would have ended. This possible scenario and end to human civilization is what a few deranged politicians are toying with in order to satisfy personal or national ego. It behoves the leaders of countries not directly involved in Africa, Asia and Latin America to stand up for the rest of the world.
