Newsfront Online …Telling the Public as it is
It is going to three months since Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine, a sovereign state and member of the United Nations without proper declaration of war even though Russia had been fighting Ukraine since 2014 after seizure of the Crimean peninsula and also supporting Russian nationalists in the Luhansk and Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine. Russia claims that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) deliberately provoked Russia into this war by expanding its membership right to the borders of Russia in the Baltic Sea nations of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania that were previously part of the Russian empire in the defunct USSR which dissolved into its constituent parts in 1991.
This was on top of its expansion to the former Warsaw Pact countries of Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, East Germany and to some of the former states of the former Yugoslavia. What appears to have raised the alarm bells in Russia was the intention of Ukraine to not only join the European Union (EU) but NATO. This to Putin was a bridge too far because Putin sees Ukraine as historically and culturally part of Russia and whose total independence was only to be tolerated as long as it remained in the Russian orbit.
The desire of Ukraine to be a Western European country enjoying some form of democracy and free enterprise economic development was unacceptable to the Kremlin whose path of development was not far from centralized communist dictatorship of the past. A successful Ukraine would therefore be a challenge to Russia. The desire of Ukraine has now been embraced by the West even though this is a recent development because throughout the Donald J. Trump’s administration, Ukraine was kept at arm’s length and denied both the military and financial support that would have deterred Putin from the costly invasion he has embarked upon. It now seems the Joe Biden‘s administration is determined to make up for American tardiness in its support for Ukraine. The issue therefore is Russian feeling of threat and Ukraine’s desire to assert its independence.
It seems the aims of Russia and Ukraine are irreconcilable and the only way to end the war is through negotiations and compromise or the total destruction of Ukraine which NATO is determined not to allow with the possibility of escalation and threat of a Third World War. Only mad leaders would want to destroy the whole world over territorial dispute in Eastern Europe. We must however remember that the world has seen two world wars over disputes between the Austro- Hungarian Empire backed by the might of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany, with Serbia backed by the Russian Romanov Empire in 1914 and Hitler’s Germany’s desire to carve out a Lebensraum in Poland and Russia in 1939 led to the Second World War. The cumulative loss of lives in the two world wars, in which Nigerian troops were involved, in wars, the causes of which they didn’t know, would be close to 200 million if one added the loss of lives caused by the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 to war casualties and deaths from collateral damage.
The world must always keep this in mind. Sometimes ago, President Putin joked about unilaterally destroying the whole world if Russia continued to be badly treated. He was heard to have said what is the point of a world existing without proper recognition of Russia. Recently some Russians with some cynical views of the world said they could throw a powerful nuclear bomb into the Western Atlantic that would precipitate huge tidal waves that would sink the entire British Isles that is the United Kingdom and Ireland. This may have been a cruel joke but it seems to capture the dangerous scenario the world is being confronted with.
President Putin had wanted to celebrate the accomplishment of his war aim in Ukraine by announcing the surrender of the country on of May 9. This would have been during the annual military parade in the Red Square in Moscow celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany by Russia in 1945. He was denied this by the robust resistance of the Ukrainian army hugely supplied with arms by the West. There seems now to be a stalemate. Russia is not winning while Ukraine is suffering from widespread destruction and killing of innocent civilians of children, women and the elderly. Russian and Ukrainian soldiers are also dying in their thousands even though the Russian authorities are hiding this from their people. Ukraine seems to be ready to abandon its desire for membership of NATO and to become a neutral state like Finland, Sweden, and Austria and Switzerland. Will this satisfy Russia? And will Russia be ready to guarantee Ukraine’s sovereign independence?
The United Nations that should make peace has been rendered ineffective because of the veto powers of Russia and China in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). The Secretary General Guiteres was not even successful in securing safe way for women and children trying to escape from fighting in many of the theatres of the war in Ukraine.
Perhaps this is the time countries in the so called Third World should revive the spirit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and send to Moscow and Washington, a delegation of select countries like Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Morocco, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina to seek for peace. Their concern should be based on preventive diplomacy of not allowing the conflict to spread to the whole world leading to the destruction of humanity. This is because if the war spreads, it will lead to nuclear Armageddon which the late President J.F. Kennedy said will eventuate in the “living envying the dead” because the suffering from radioactive fallout will be so intolerable that instant death would be preferable to surviving.
Even without the war becoming a world war, the entire world is already suffering with shortages of wheat, vegetable oil, gas and oil and inflation everywhere leading to social uprising in some countries already. This actually proves Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant right that global free trade should normally lead to global peace. This war has shown that we all live in a global village of economic and political interconnectedness on which mankind should build to secure global peace and harmony. Can we imagine if the trillions of dollars spent on armaments were invested in amelioration of conditions of man on this planet what effect this will have on everyone?
We cannot say we haven’t been warned about the danger of allowing “the war parties” in our countries to take over the deep state and dictate national policies. General Dwight Eisenhower, the Second World War hero who later became American president warned against the military industrial complex seizing the control of America and always benefiting from putting America on warpath and so-called military preparedness. The war in Ukraine has gone on for too long and it is within the power of mankind to stop it through diplomacy mounted by neutrals that are not directly involved.
(thenationonlineng.net)
