{"id":206895,"date":"2022-03-14T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2022-03-14T12:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=206895"},"modified":"2022-03-12T09:49:33","modified_gmt":"2022-03-12T09:49:33","slug":"stop-the-ukraine-war-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/03\/stop-the-ukraine-war-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Stop the Ukraine War — Now!"},"content":{"rendered":"

11 Mar 2022 –<\/em> The war in Ukraine can and must be stopped now, before any more Ukrainians or Russians are killed and maimed, by declaring a ceasefire and then negotiating a peace. \u00a0Ending the rocket attacks is not \u201crocket science.\u201d\u00a0 The Russians can halt troop movements toward Kyiv and other major cities, stop air and ground bombardments, and suspend further troop mobilizations and shipment of weapons into Ukraine. The Ukrainians can stop attacking Russian troops, and the members of NATO can cease shipping weapons to Ukrainian forces.\u00a0 Economic sanctions against the Russians by the U.S. and Europe can be suspended pending a successful peace negotiation.<\/p>\n

In fact, this almost certainly describes how the conflict will eventually end: in a ceasefire followed by negotiations.\u00a0 A decisive victory or defeat for either party is highly unlikely.\u00a0 An attempt by Russia to re-absorb Ukraine would destabilize that nation for decades, as well as driving the U.S. and NATO to arm Eastern Europe to the teeth \u2013 circumstances that Putin declared to be intolerable prior to the invasion. \u00a0By the same token, absorbing Ukraine into the American-European empire would be a Pyrrhic victory, further undermining Russian security and inspiring Russian leaders to unite with China in attacking American interests around the globe.<\/p>\n

So, why not avoid the sacrifice of thousands more lives and billions of dollars by ending the war now?\u00a0 The answer, I\u2019m afraid, lies in two forms of radical misapprehension: the West\u2019s fixation on World War II and the need to punish aggressors, and Russia\u2019s fixation on the Cold War and the need to undo the humiliation and damage suffered following the U.S.S.R.\u2019s collapse.<\/p>\n

Allies in World War II, competitors in the Cold War, both parties now seem driven by fear of each other.\u00a0 The U.S. and their NATO partners claim to see Putin as a new Hitler or Stalin who will continue to conquer other nations unless stopped by superior military and economic force.\u00a0 The Russians claim to see the West as aggressive imperialists who not only won the Cold War but continued to expand their realm at Russia\u2019s expense. Each side\u2019s leaders are mortally afraid of showing weakness \u2013 yet all understand that continued escalation of the conflict could end in an unthinkable nuclear war.<\/p>\n

Russia and the United States, NATO, and Ukraine must therefore agree to come to the table \u2013 but who will come first?\u00a0 The primary responsibility, it seems clear, is on the party whose refusal<\/em> to negotiate set the stage for the Russian invasion \u2013 the United States and the NATO nations.<\/p>\n

There is no excuse for Vladimir Putin\u2019s invasion of a neighboring country.\u00a0 Not even the destruction wreaked on Russian-speaking Donbas separatists by the Kyiv regime justified this violence. \u00a0But \u201cpunishing\u201d Putin in ways that prolong and escalate the conflict and that cause suffering for civilians on both sides is horribly counterproductive.\u00a0 Russia\u2019s resort to force was unjustified, but not unprovoked.\u00a0 If the West had taken Putin\u2019s concerns seriously enough in the first place to negotiate in good faith about Ukraine\u2019s relationship to NATO and the increasing number of missiles and other arms being placed in Eastern Europe, there would have been no invasion.<\/p>\n

What lessons are to be drawn from this? First, Mr. Putin has got to get over the fact that the Soviet Union lost the Cold War and that its Russian successor regimes were treated in a punitive and humiliating way by the West.\u00a0 That\u2019s history; time to move on.\u00a0 Second, the West has got to understand that Putin is a ruthless, often cruel nationalist leader, but not the reincarnation of Hitler or Stalin.\u00a0 That\u2019s history; time to move on.\u00a0 To insist on arming Ukraine and punishing Russia because of this invasion without calculating the results in terms of lost lives and the possibility of world war is a knee-jerk, emotion-driven reaction, not a rational or humane policy.<\/p>\n

One further note: just as Putin must stop fantasizing about a Ukraine that \u201cbelongs\u201d to Russia as in medieval days, Biden and the European leaders must stop pontificating about the alleged right of all \u201csovereign nations\u201d to join any military alliance that they like.\u00a0 As the Westerners should know, national sovereignty is far more flexible in practice than this.\u00a0 Finland and Austria are sovereign nations in every respect, yet they were demilitarized after World War II and prevented from joining either side in the Cold War.\u00a0 The right of Ukraine to join NATO is no more absolute than was the right of Cuba to join the Warsaw Pact. \u00a0These are matters to be negotiated, and you don\u2019t start negotiations by saying that the other side\u2019s demands are non-negotiable!<\/p>\n

One definition of insanity, we are told, is a refusal or inability to learn from one\u2019s mistakes. The Russian invasion was evidently expected to produce a fairly easy victory without serious violence against civilians or the destruction of cities, but Ukrainian resistance and the rustiness of Russia\u2019s military establishment spoiled this scenario. The U.S. and NATO apparently thought that by arming the Ukrainians and imposing harsh economic sanctions on Russia, they could compel Putin to withdraw his forces.\u00a0 But these pressures did not deter him from continuing the war, nor did they produce the anti-Putin rebellion that some Westerners hoped for.\u00a0 On the contrary, the failure of expectations on each side has incited each side\u2019s leaders to escalate the conflict to a tragically destructive level.<\/p>\n

The war in Ukraine has already gone on far too long.\u00a0 It is time for each side to cut its losses and get back to the negotiating table.\u00a0 Now \u2013 right now! — is the time for a ceasefire. There simply is no alternative to a negotiated peace.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> <\/em>Richard E. Rubenstein is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University\u2019s Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution. A graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), and Harvard Law School, Rubenstein is the author of nine books on analyzing and resolving violent social conflicts. His most recent book is <\/em>Resolving Structural Conflicts: How Violent Systems Can Be Transformed (Routledge, 2017). <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

11 Mar 2022 – The war in Ukraine can and must be stopped now, before any more Ukrainians or Russians are killed and maimed, by declaring a ceasefire and then negotiating a peace. A decisive victory or defeat for either party is highly unlikely. Now \u2013 right now! — is the time for a ceasefire. There simply is no alternative to a negotiated peace. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":103021,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[2009,2197,1035,1268,91,818,253,278,254,961,70,92,481],"class_list":["post-206895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-anti-war","tag-biden","tag-eastern-europe","tag-european-union","tag-nato","tag-proxy-war","tag-putin","tag-russia","tag-security","tag-ukraine","tag-usa","tag-violent-conflict","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}