Have we adjusted the doomsday clock for daylight savings?

Two powers tangle ambiguously on a nuclear tightrope in a proxy war while we all stand in stasis below

Devastation in Mariupol (Source: Twitter)

As Russia looks to intensify its attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure in an increasingly desperate effort to force the Ukrainian government into capitulation, truckloads of shoulder mounted guided rockets and random groups of fighters and soldiers of fortune hitch rides into a nebulous conflict that is looking to turn Ukraine into the next Syria, or something even worse.

We talk about the inevitability of the war, the horror of an unfolding invasion, but we speak little of the lack of genuine diplomacy from two great nuclear powers. We also see the moving parts on the battlefield, an aggressor led by a duplicitous autocrat that has inflicted crimes on his own people to secure his lifelong seat in the Kremlin, invading a sovereign nation and smashing provincial centers with thermobaric rocket artillery and tactics of attrition.

The fog of war continues to allow for convolution, foreign troops are joining a Russian invading force of Ossetians and Chechens, even suggestions at Libyan mercenaries entering the fray, whilst billions of dollars of high-tech weaponry is flooded into the country by both sides to arm whoever wishes to take it. All the components of total war are flowing into a deepening quagmire that is being allowed to continue down the corridor of Europe.

The destruction in Ukraine (Source: Reuters)

The frozen Europeans are doing a version of “Peace in our time”, hooked on Russian oil and dark money, while their major NATO partner seeks what can only be seen as a great power tussle over ideological living space in the East. Two great powers stall over multiple simultaneous nuclear grade concerns popping up from the Baltic to the Black Sea: why would either party allow this to persist?

If Russia said it would invade if NATO entered Ukraine, and NATO knew it would never go to war with Russia to defend Ukraine (see WWIII), then why did NATO keep pushing for this inevitable result? If it had no intention of helping a small country fight a military superpower controlled by the authoritarian leader of our age, if Russia was also using its act of aggression to achieve war goals at the expense of civilian lives, why are Ukrainians being terrorized in a war zone?

Russia fights this war kinetically and NATO opposes them via a proxy war on Ukrainian soil, a battle of attrition that exacts on Ukrainian civilian lives and critical infrastructure and ultimately ends with the total destruction of Ukraine.

Many in the west point to Putin’s desire to restore some imperial/Soviet empire, while that could be possible, in the world outside the western bubble, in India, Pakistan, China, Brazil and African nations, the reporting and optics are not nearly the same. They point to grievances that are mentioned by the relentless complainant: Vladimir Putin.

Stalled negotiations and failed assurances by several US presidents about receding the push by NATO into former Soviet nations, on top of initial guarantees starting from the fall of the Soviet Union, not to move further east than Germany,  have been compounded by two decades of revolution, economic crisis and corruption fostered by great power interventionism in Ukraine. Russia has alleged war crimes in the Donbas, before it line in the sand over NATO in Ukraine.

If Russia is not looking to restore the expanse of Soviet Union, perhaps it is attempting to create a vacuum of chaos in Ukraine, an ungovernable failed state controlled by nebulous armed groups, a true buffer against the expansion of NATO.

"While you're talking, we are dying," protesters say as U.S. President Joe Biden visits Poland to discuss Russia's war in Ukraine.(Source: The Kyiv Independent)

The US on the other hand, seem to want this war to continue, the billions of dollars of weaponry approved by congress indicate this, doing little to improve the inflation at home, and plenty for the weapons industry who has been hanging out for another cheque since the “conclusion” of the twenty year war in Afghanistan via Iraq. Throughout this war, and the actions leading up to it, the US must have a line of sight, however faint, to remove Putin from power. Will it risk arming ideologically chaotic militias to achieve this as it did with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, the Free Syria Army and Al Nusra in Syria, and countless other examples of needled human destruction from Nicaragua to Vietnam, from Libya to Iraq.

Two great powers, crunching numbers involving nuclear arsenals and sleepy protocols, grinding a young country to a pulp for objectives that only favour the two players, at the expense of everyone else. Somewhere in the middle, the Ukrainians have been encouraged to pursue this resistance alone. A young democracy fraught with internal issues, compounded by decades of concerted outside influence by two great powers, limited in its options every day this war continues, paying the true toll of this irresponsible war.

There are some people who study this situation like Professor John Mearsheimer who say the west has led Ukraine “down the primrose path”, thus condemning the Ukrainians to ruin, for objectives that perhaps they could never achieve. In all the tension, build-up and inevitability of this war, where are the paths to deterrence? The US and NATO could have done so much more to avoid this outcome in Ukraine.

You hear western journalists highlighting the difference between these white Christian Europeans fleeing Ukraine and distant strangers from brown lands fleeing brown warzones, callous to the equal shame of global conflict, avoiding the real distinction about the nature of this crisis to that of the others– this one is a fluxing stalemate unravelling in an unprecedented modern war between the two biggest nuclear arsenals in the world.

This is a situation looking to pack the punch of 10x Cuban Missile crisis’, hyper accelerating by the lack of any genuine diplomatic endeavour. Can an invasion facilitated by a nuclear tipped military aggressor with self-perceived grievance, be mollified by NATO waging an asymmetrical proxy war based on a hopeful outcome of regime change? If not, this is at the expense of Ukrainian lives and infrastructure and a needless addition to the global crisis we are experiencing.

As it stands, it could be in Moscow’s best interest to end this war, both strategically and existentially, the impact of the loss of young Russian conscripts, military assets and the devastating effect of the sanctions at home and abroad have already changed the optics of Putin’s war. Yet these factors will not stop it. It must be in NATOs interest to avoid large scale conflict in Europe, to resist flooding additional weaponry into Ukraine to prolong the conflict in lieu of any effort to pursue peace, but over a month into an unprecedented war, no one has heard a true word about resolution. Have we adjusted the doomsday clock for daylight savings?