It’s eye-opening to see how the battles are highly concentrated in Europe. It makes sense when you think it has a long history of small nations living cheek by jowl, many of whom formed empires by conquest. Europe has of course evolved and through the unity of the European Union has sought to maintain peace–nonetheless old disputes arising from their fraught history cause modern wars, like Ukraine and the Balkans. Though Europe tried to keep peace with Russia through diplomacy and trade, and by refusing to let Ukraine join NATO because Putin had made clear this would be crossing a red line and Russia would retaliate. So at the 2008 Bucharest Summit, NATO rejected Ukraine’s request for an application for membership (through vetos by Germany’s Merkel and France’s Sarkozy) in an effort to appease Putin and has never budged. Unfortunately, dictators with delusions of imperial conquest cannot be appeased. So instead of maintaining the peace, leaving Ukraine unprotected outside of NATO only allowed Putin to indulge his fantasy of being Czar Vladimir the Great and invade Ukraine, annexing Crimea by force, fighting a war by proxy through Russians living in Eastern Ukraine, and escalating to an all-out invasion a year ago. Thankfully, Canada (which has a modest but highly trained professional military force) has been training Ukrainian troops for a decade, in response to the invasion of Crimea and proxy war in Eastern Ukraine, over 40,000 of them now, and continues in Poland and Britain, alongside British instructors. Our 320 military instructors had to relocate to Poland when Russia invaded as NATO troops cannot be in Ukraine without risking a direct confrontation that would lead to WWIII. Canada was one of the nations in favour of allowing Ukraine to apply for NATO membership at the 2008 Summit and has the highest number of ethnic Ukrainians outside Ukraine and Russia–including our Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance. So Ukraine, with high-level training from Canada with assists from the UK and US, and with all the weapons and supplies given them by NATO and other countries, was able to defend itself in ways Putin and his fellow warmongers did not predict.
So as much as this is entirely Putin’s fault, and Europe had been actively seeking to avoid conflict with Russia, and cannot let an invading imperial dictatorial country conquer a fellow European democracy without at least giving it the means to defend itself–nonetheless here we are: the world’s most prosperous and powerful nations are yet again expending their time, energy and resources on a completely unnecessary European war.
And I can completely understand how the Global South is completely fed up when they need us to be focusing on the climate crisis, ongoing pandemic, natural disasters, other wars, etc. That said, we can’t let Putin win: even if we were willing to sacrifice Ukraine, Putin would not stop there, just as he did not stop when the world let him get away with invading and annexing Crimea. It only encouraged him to try and conquer more of and then all of Ukraine. If we had let him win, he would have next conquered Moldova. Then the tiny Baltic States he insists historically belong to Russia–because Russia conquered and oppressed them in previous centuries. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have been NATO members for decades precisely to protect them from another Russian invasion. Which Putin can no longer dismiss as “Russophobia” as not only has Russia invaded them in recent history, it has just invaded a neighbor in current time. So the Baltics legitimately needed the Deterrence and Defense NATO membership offers. They are not encroaching on Russia in any way. They are merely preventing Putin from invading their sovereign territory and that angers him because he very much wants to invade.
But if NATO let Putin conquer Ukraine and Moldova (which is officially neutral and not a NATO country), then Putin might make a terrible miscalculation and invade the Baltics, assuming NATO is weak and will sacrifice the three little countries like it did Ukraine and Moldova. But “an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us” and “not one inch” is the very creed of NATO. The moment Russian soldiers set one jackboot in the Baltics, we have WWIII between nuclear powers. Alternatively, Putin might try to conquer Finland and Sweden before they become official NATO members. It is telling that Turkey, geopolitically and socioeconomically vulnerable to Putin’s bullying, is deliberately stalling and sabotaging the admission of Finland and Sweden. But even before they are official members, they officially have the protection of NATO nations like the UK and they both have very well-trained military forces. The Russian army is in shambles, resorting to untrained conscripts and obsolete weapons at this point. Finland and Sweden could take them, but Russia fights dirty, bombing civilians. And NATO nations would move to protect them, and once again we risk WWIII. And not only would allowing Russia to invade and conquer sovereign nations with impunity send the completely wrong message to Putin, but also to all the other dictators eying other nations with imperial conquest in mind. If we abandoned Ukraine, how long before Chinese leader Xi Jinping invades Taiwan, for example?
So the only answer is to give Ukraine everything it needs to win. We are only now providing Ukraine with our Leopard 2 tanks (they are German-made and Germany waited one year in to the war before it lifted the prohibition on giving them to another country.) If we had moved faster Ukraine would have won by now. And that’s the only answer. We cannot allow Putin to win, NATO cannot fight in Ukraine and risk escalating to a world war, so we need to give Ukraine everything it needs to win. As quickly as possible and then move on to other problems.
And find new ways of preventing wars in Europe and elsewhere. Economic sanctions, international censure, legal actions and accusations, attempts at appeasem*nt through building trade and diplomatic relations and capitulating to Putin’s threats over allowing Ukraine to apply for NATO protection when Ukraine as a sovereign nation under threat of Russian invasion had every right to want to join an international alliance that would deter invasion–none of it stopped Putin from repeatedly invading Ukraine between 2014 and now.
Meanwhile, we should find ways to make sure the needs of the Global South are not neglected. By a quirk of geography, most of the powerful and prosperous nations are in the north where most of the landmass and most developed countries are. The Global South is mainly made up of former colonies of northern nations, and/or small developing nations in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Oceania. Organizations like G20 try to balance that but more is needed. Perhaps a U.N.-led Global South Year–as soon as we help Ukraine defeat the brutal and illegal Russian invasion.
