With that said, I am extremely concerned when I hear the familiar drumbeats in Washington, the bellicose rhetoric that gets amplified before every war, demanding that we must “show strength”, “get tough” and not engage in “appeasement”. In my view, we must unequivocally support the sovereignty of Ukraine and make clear that the international community will impose severe consequences on Putin and his associates if he does not change course. Having already seized parts of Ukraine in 2014, the Russian president now threatens to take over the entire country and destroy Ukrainian democracy. We should be clear about who is most responsible for this looming crisis: Vladimir Putin. And, by the way, any hope of international cooperation to address the existential threat of global climate crisis and future pandemics would suffer a major setback. It is likely that Russians will not be the only people suffering from sanctions. The sanctions against Russia and Russia’s threatened response to those sanctions, could result in massive economic upheaval – with impacts on energy, banking, food and the day-to-day needs of ordinary people throughout the entire world. What might happen then is even more horrifying.īut that’s not all. There is also the possibility that this “regional” war could escalate to other parts of Europe. In addition, of course, there would be many thousands of deaths within the Ukrainian and Russian militaries. But there are estimates that there could be over 50,000 civilian casualties in Ukraine, and millions of refugees flooding neighboring countries as they flee what could be the worst European conflict since the second world war. No one knows exactly what the human costs of such a war would be.
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