There are but a few weeks left in this calendar year, and though I have been fortunate enough to have experienced more than seventy of them in my eventful lifetime, this is one year that I think I would rather forget.
Of course, the main reason has been the Russia’s wretched and criminal invasion of Ukraine, which has caused death, destruction and misery on a scale that is hard to process for a rational mind. It is hard to understand how in our supposedly “civilized” modern age, a whole nation of people can act in such a barbarous, sadistic and amoral manner as have the Russians.
Despite the increasingly ridiculous and frenzied rhetoric that the Russians use to justify their invasion, Ukraine posed no military threat to Russia. Neither did the rest of Europe and NATO. There were no hordes of troops massing on Russia’s border, ready to overrun Moscow. This war was blatant and primitively imperialistic aggression by a country that has never given up on its delusions of ruling the world, or at least as much as it can conquer militarily. Politically and as a civilization, Russia appears to have made little evolutionary progress from the time when Ivan the Terrible brutalized his own people and all his unfortunate neighbours.
After ten months of fighting, it is looking increasingly like Russia miscalculated badly, and now stands little chance of succeeding in this war. Not only that, but Putin has painted himself into a corner with no exit plan, and the most likely denouement to his military adventurism, will be his own demise and possibly the disintegration and fragmentation of Russia itself. There is no succession plan in an authoritarian dictatorship, and history has shown us that they usually end badly and bloodily.
Although I am confident that I will witness Russia’s defeat in the very near future, I am greatly saddened and angered by all the pain that Ukraine and its people have had to suffer because of the sadistic delusions of a petty ex-KGB flunky that managed to ruthlessly gain power in Russia.
It will take decades for Ukraine to recover and rebuild its shattered cities and infrastructure. There will be millions of mines that will need to be disarmed. There will be vast tracts of land that sustained serious ecological damage that will need to be rehabilitated. There will be hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths that will need to be mourned. There will be thousands of war crimes that will need to be investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice. There will be millions of people’s lives that will have to be rebuilt after the cruelties inflicted on them by a supposed “brotherly” neighbour. I think we have come to appreciate in recent decades what PTSD is and the harm it can do to people in the long term. Ukrainians will experience PTSD on a scale that has few parallels in all of history.
This war has come as a great shock, not only to Ukrainians, but to the whole of the free world as well. After the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the USSR, few would have thought that another major war of conquest would happen in Europe. To be sure, most people recognized that Russia was far from being a democratic state, but few would have guessed that Russia’s leadership would dust off and resurrect Stalinist era fascist ambitions of ruling the world. Yet that is exactly what has happened.
The free world is now faced with a major challenge of how to not only nip Putin’s ambitions in the bud, but how to construct a new world order that will prevent similar evil from arising again in the future. The war will not end when the last Russian troops leave Ukrainian soil. There can never be true peace again in this neck of the woods, until Russia is stripped of its ability as well as desire to conquer others.
The world’s major powers must revamp the current system of alliances and organizations such as the United Nations and NATO so that they can more quickly and effectively respond to threats such as those posed by Putin or any other tinpot dictator that threatens the peace and stability of mankind. It was obvious as this year unfolded that the world was grossly unprepared to deal with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and it is still struggling to do so.
We can only hope that there will be real lessons learned from what is still continuing to happen in Ukraine, and that 2023 will see an end to this modern tragedy.
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