We don’t need another World War, Especially a Nuclear one!
The Self-inflicted Ukraine War and the Irresponsible Escalations
Every time I switch on the TV, I see the Ukraine- Russia war escalating day by day and the US and NATO forces helping Ukraine by providing the military aid and equipment to fight the Russian invasion. Russia is responding by putting its nuclear deterrence forces on high alert to show the West that they would not even mind using it to win the war. They also started bombarding Ukraine’s civilian neighborhoods with no consideration of human life in retaliation of Ukrainian defense. This invasion is killing thousands and destroying Ukraine’s infrastructure to scale that it will take decades for them to rebuild. This war is also threatening the entire world because anytime this conflict can turn into a nuclear apocalypse affecting billions of people all around the world. The US and NATO are pouring fuel into the conflict by encouraging Ukraine on their self-destruction by aiding them with more MIG Fighter Jets, surface-to-air missiles, and anti-tank Javelins. What kind of a foolish and irresponsible step is this? First of all, These 40-year-old old Soviet MIG 29ss from Poland are no match to the latest 5th generation Sukhoi Jets or the MIG 31s that Russia Posses. Second, what if Russia attacks Poland for helping Ukraine in War. This has the potential for a 3rd world war that will only cause more destruction and loss of lives. Poland being a member of NATO, this could invoke Article 5, dragging the US and all the European allies into War, A war with a Communist nation ruled by a dictator who has stockpiles of nuclear Warheads more than all of NATO combined.
Ukraine’s defeat is inevitable because you only need common sense and simple logic to understand that David’s victory over Goliath only happens in stories, or by fluke. In reality, the Chance for that to happen is extremely rare. The war in Ukraine can only be resolved by peaceful negotiations and by Ukraine’s military putting arms down to prevent further loss of life.
For the prospect of a peaceful resolution, they should look back at the Origins of this War. For Putin, the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO means enemy troop deployment at his Doorstep. Authoritarian leaders like Putin are insecure by nature and they can easily be threatened by even a slight shift in the geopolitical landscape. When Trump was the US president, he undermined NATO’s importance which made Putin safer than ever before. But when President Biden Took office, he took measures to strengthen and expand NATO and that made Putin threatened. Putin could have even interpreted that as retaliation for meddling with the 2016 US election. On Top of this, The newly elected, Pro-Western Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy even started active discussions with NATO and the New US Administration for their membership in NATO. I have no clue why all these negotiations have to be so publicized just to antagonize Russia. After Zelenskyy met with President Biden in 2021 in Washington, he told to the Press, "I feel that the president Biden personally, and not only feel - I heard this - the president personally supports Ukraine regarding the granting of NATO membership." ., Quoting Reuters
None of the Past Ukrainian Presidents were so Pro-Western or aggressive in their demand for NATO membership. They never engaged in direct talks with the United States which Russia considers as their number one adversary. They always took a neutral stand to avoid waking up their sleeping Giant next door. But the new Ukrainian president, Zelenskyy, was so naïve that he clearly underestimated the Kremlin and Putin’s fears. He even tried to torpedo Russia’s Nord Stream 2 Oil pipeline citing Ukraine’s security concerns in his meeting with President Biden. Considering that more than half of Russia’s federal budget is from the Oil and Natural GAS profits, this was not a just mistake on Zelenskyy ‘s part, but rather a stupid one. In response to Zelenskyy, President Biden reaffirmed that the U.S. continued to be "firmly committed to Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity and the support for Ukraine's Euro-Atlantic aspiration." And offered 60 million dollars in Defense Aid to Ukraine.
Forget about Russia, these kinds of alliances can even threaten a Democratic Country if their adversaries build up forces and deploy missiles in their backyard. This was a stupid cold war strategy that even caused the Cuban missile crisis in our own backyard. Putin being Bullish, Authoritarian, and Mean-spirited didn’t take this challenge as a light one at all and responded with Full force. That’s what we are seeing now. Instead of doing all the publicity stunts and announcing Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO, why didn’t NATO and US make Ukraine their member first and then announce all these aspirations afterward. That way, if it was part of NATO, Russia would have never invaded Ukraine at all. By announcing all their NATO aspirations in advance allowed Russia to take the countermeasures in the harshest and most devastating manner. Ukraine made a mistake by electing an inexperienced, comedian as their leader and they are now paying a price for that. Like Zelenskyy desires, the United States and NATO will never get directly involved to prevent this slaughter because they very well know how this conflict will turn into if they do. But the most humane thing the US and NATO can do now is to stay away from this conflict and push Ukraine leadership and Military to stop fighting to avoid any further loss of life. Any more their involvement could aggravate Russia more to even force them to nuke one of the Ukrainian Cities. Putin will do that If body bags continue to pile up on the Russian side due to Ukraine’s retaliatory actions. If it happens, just imagine what kind of destruction and carnage it will cause. If Zelenskyy cares for his people a little bit, he should adhere to the conditions Russia put forth and stop the bloodshed of his people as a responsible leader. When the adversary is too powerful to fight, non-violence will be the best option to fight your enemy. That’s what Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela did to defeat the ruthless and powerful British Colonialism.
Last week, The United States working with the European Partners imposed tough economic sanctions again Russia. But in the past, these types of economic sanctions and embargos never worked against any other countries. Cuba, Iran, North Korea are examples. It only made the authoritarian leaderships in those countries more strong and more powerful because they blamed the West and the US for everything and injected the nationalistic feelings in their population to stand up against Imperialism which made the common man’s life miserable in that country. Economic Sanctions Against Russia are only is going to affect the poor Russian people who have nothing to do with the Ukraine War. Sanctions will cripple the Russian economy and the poor Russian people will be again standing in Bread lines as they did back in the days after the Soviet Collapse. This will have no impact on Putin and his Oligarchs. If they cannot sell oil, they will start selling arms even nukes in the global market to make money. Do you think the world is going to be safer that way?
Suppose the Economic Sanctions and embargos make the Russian people revolt against their government and dethrone Putin. Now you have a failed State in hand, with 5977 Nuclear warheads floating all over the world, which will threaten our lives for generations to come.
I have one simple question for the US administration. Why are we trying to protect the democracies around this world when ours was on the brink of collapse last year in the form of the Jan 6th insurrection? On top of that, We had around 1 million people die in this country due to the Covid pandemic and that’s more than any other nation in this world. Even though we are recovering from the pandemic now, we are now faced with unprecedented inflation crippling our daily lives. The last thing we need is getting dragged into another war, possibly a nuclear war. US and NATO involvement in Ukraine is only made things worse from the beginning. We did not elect a Democratic President to resolve the issues all around the world or be the cause of it. We elected President Biden, to Unify this country after the Trump apocalypse, fix the economic and Wealth disparities, address Systemic Racism, bring the Socio-Economic reforms and make Education affordable, etc. We are not seeing any of those happening and instead, we are getting into more and more trouble.
The colonialism of Britain and France and Nazism in Germany has killed more than 100 million people around the world in the last century. And these are the countries now talking about Human rights violations. For them, Human rights violation only exist if happens to White European people. It’s sad to see the bombardment and the mass displacement of people in Ukraine. But it is happening not only in Ukraine, As per the UN Refugee Agency, as of 2020, there are around 82 Million people around this world who are in internally displaced Status out of which around 20 million people are refugees. Please see the UNHCR graph below. This figure is going up every year. The War in Syria caused 6.7 Million refugees. The Venezuelan crisis created 4 Million Refugees to flee that country alone, 2.6 million Refugees from Afghanistan, and 2.2 Million from South Sudan. If you look at the Top 5 Major source countries which contributed to the refugee crisis, you will see that these are mostly Brown and Black People. 15 Million of these people are living in small clumsy makeshift tents fighting the extreme weather conditions lacking food, water, or any medicine. Millions of kids who are living in these conditions have no education or nutritious food. Many are malnutritioned and possibly will die. I have not seen any 24/7 news coverage to help these people.
Please read the UNHCR’s data below on the Internally displaced people and refugees around the world
https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html
Similarly from last year, the war in Ethiopia is killing thousands and displacing more than 2.5 million people in that country.
As per the United Nations, In Afghanistan Under the new Taliban control, “23 million afghans are in desperate need of food out of the total 38 million population in that country. 14 million kids are hungry, around 3.2 million children are acutely malnourished, 1.1 million children are at risk of dying because of severe, acute malnutrition.” Please read the article below.
https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html
So these people are not Humans?
if we talk about the Death and Destruction due to wars in this century, From the Brown universities research, “Iraq and Afghanistan war alone resulted in a total of around 500,000 deaths including 7000 of our own”. Also destabilized the entire middle east region.
You would think, this Ukraine War and the millions of refugees fleeing that country to the neighboring EU countries could eventually aggravate the EU refugee crisis. Maybe not. A couple of weeks before the Ukraine - Russia War, Poland was constructing a border wall to ward off refugees from the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Africa. Now they have opened their borders and welcomed millions of refugees from Ukraine. So EU and Poland have no problem with the refugees from Ukraine. Maybe the Walls are mostly built to keep the brown and black people away. That’s why even in this country, we only have it on one side of the border.
The only people this war is going to benefit are the Arms companies and authoritarian regimes around the world. Ukraine’s crisis is going to create an unprecedented Arms race around the world using which these companies and countries will be able to manufacture and sell trillions of dollars worth of arms all over the world. It will only shoot up the number of Internally Displaced people and refugees in this world. Other Hot issues like Global Warming and the uplifting of the poor countries around the world will go to the back seat of issues.
I will finish this article by bringing up an example of how the Ukraine crisis could affect other developing countries like India. For the last one week, India has faced harsh criticism from the west and the US for being neutral in the Russia-Ukraine war.
India is neutral in this conflict because it does not want to upset Russia. For the last 5 decades, India had a strong strategic partnership with Russia in its defense sector. 90% of India’s defense equipment is imported from Russia which includes Sukhoi and MIG fighter jets, T90 series tanks, even AK series automatic rifles. Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO-Similar to NASA in the US) was heavily dependent on Russia from its early stages to even now in space exploration, cryogenic development, rocket propulsion, and satellite launching capabilities and technologies. ISRO is the world’s fifth-best space agency now and Russia’s help is undisputed in achieving that. So How can India go up against Russia which will spoil all their defense and space partnership with Russia? India knows that such an action will weaken its armed forces especially when it shares a border with two big nuclear adversaries like China and Pakistan.
At the same time, in the past many decades, the United States has been helping India’s main adversary Pakistan with F16 fighter jets and missiles to counter Russia’s influence on India and the region. A continuing remanence of the arms race from the cold war. So India joined the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) of 120 developing countries that are not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc. That way these developing nations won’t get crushed in the power play between the rich and powerful countries. This is why countries like India and Brazil are neutral in Ukraine-Russia War.
This is critical because the foreign policies of major power blocs are shifting based on which parties are in power. For example, the US foreign policy is changing based on who is in Power. We currently have a President who does not like Putin and had another President who wouldn’t miss any opportunity to praise the Russian government and Putin. Trump even said Putin is a genius for invading Ukraine!!! If he comes back in power in 2024, he may even remove all the sanctions against Russia, the same way he vowed to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists. who knows. So these developing nations won’t take any sides in these types of conflicts involving the US and Russia, because US Foreign policy could reverse course after four years.
by Hari Ramachandran