So, Has All The Destruction Inflicted Upon Ukraine Been Worth It?

It's not a small responsibility to assume the leadership of a nation.

For one's primary duty is to ensure the safety of millions of people, the great majority of whom may not even have had a direct say in one's accession to power.

In return for the privilege of being the nation's top person, a leader must be wiser than an owl and craftier than a serpent.

Has the Ukrainian President, Mr Volodymyr Zelensky, displayed the leadership qualities that could have saved his nation from the brutal pulverisation to which it has been subjected by Russia?

I do not think so. It is now reported that QUOTE

“Ukrainian president Zelensky says Ukraine is ready to accept a neutralstatus as part of a peace deal with Russia. [He said this] on Sunday [27 March 2022] in an interview with Russian independent journalists.

"Security guarantees, and the neutral, non-nuclear status of our state: we are ready to accept this," Zelensky said. Zelensky further told the journalists that, "This was the first point of principle for the Russian Federation, as I recall. And as far as I remember, they started the war because of this." UNQUOTE

He did not say that this was a change in his position, but he did stipulate that “Any agreement would have to be put to the Ukrainian people in a referendum”. And he once again stressed his “desire to reach a concrete peace agreement [with Russia]”

He added QUOTE: "So this clause is a security guarantee clause for Ukraine. And since they [the Russians] say it's for them [security guarantees] as well, it's understandable to me, and it's being discussed. It's in-depth, but I'm interested in making sure that it's not just another piece of paper.... So we're interested in having that paper turned into a serious treaty to be signed..." The issues of Donbas and Crimea must be discussed and solved [in the peace talks, as well.]” UNQUOTE

President Zelensky's comments came as the Turkish presidency announced that the next round of the talks the Turks have been superintending between Russian and Ukrainian delegates, would be held in the Turkish city of Istanbul on Tuesday, 29 March 2022.

The question is: why hasn't Mr Zelensky made this offer of Ukrainian “neutrality” until now? Such a declaration may not have deterred President Vladimir Putin of Russia from brutally invading Ukraine, but Mr Zelensky would have scored more points against Putin had he done so.

It is, in fact, ironical that it is the Turks who are featuring so prominently in efforts to get the Russians and the Ukrainians to try and reach agreement. For it was Turkey which, in 1962, nearly brought a Third World War between the USSR and the USA about! Such a war would have meant the end of the world, of course, since it would have been carried out with thermonuclear weapons. This is how declassified US national security archives outline the situation that faced the USSR and the NATO nations at the time :

QUOTE: “If the Cuban Missile Crisis was the most dangerous passage of the Cold War, the most dangerous moment of [that] Crisis was the evening of Saturday, 27 October 1962, when the resolution of the crisis—war or peace—appeared to hang in the balance.

“While Soviet ships had not attempted to break the U.S naval blockade of Cuba, Soviet nuclear missile bases remained on the island and were rapidly becoming operational. And pressure on President Kennedy to order an air strike, or invasion, was mounting, especially after an American reconnaissance plane was shot down over Cuba that Saturday afternoon, and its pilot killed.

“Hopes that a satisfactory resolution to the crisis could be reached between Washington and Moscow had dimmed, moreover, when a letter from Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev arrived Saturday morning demanding that the United States agree to remove its Jupiter missiles from TURKEY in exchange for a Soviet removal of missiles from Cuba....

“On Saturday evening, after a day of tense discussions within the ... Executive Committee of [his] senior advisers, President Kennedy decided on a dual strategy—a formal letter to Khrushchev accepting the implicit terms of his October 26 letter (a U.S. non-invasion pledge in exchange for the verifiable departure of Soviet nuclear missiles), coupled with private assurances to Khrushchev that the United States would speedily take out its missiles from TURKEY, but only on the basis of a secret understanding, not as an open agreement.... The U.S. president elected to transmit this sensitive message through his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who met in his office at the Justice Department with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.

“That meeting has long been recognized as a turning point in the crisis, but several aspects of it have been shrouded in mystery and confusion. One concerned the issue of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey....

“The first important Soviet account of the event to emerge was contained in the tape-recorded memoirs of deposed Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, which were smuggled to the West and published in 1970 (after Khrushchev's death)..... The second volume of Khrushchev's memoirs (Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament), published posthumously in 1974,... included the flat statement …. that "President Kennedy said that in exchange for the withdrawal of our missiles [from Cuba] he would remove American missiles from TURKEY AND ITALY." UNQUOTE

Has President Zelensky taken the trouble to become thoroughly conversant with the secret Russian reports on the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which resembles the current Ukrainian-Russian-NATO tug-of-war in so many respects? If he had done so, I doubt whether he would have been – seemingly – playing with fire by making public, his desire to take Ukraine into NATO!

The point is that Zelensky should have realised that President Putin, a former KGB officer, has a visceral, emotional antipathy to NATO, having personally experienced life under the full rigours of the Cold War, when he was the KGB's top man stationed in East Germany. When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, ex-KGB high-echelon officers like Putin would have taken it like a blow to the solar plexus! For it's no exaggeration to say that they counted their lives by the minute, whilst they were fighting the Cold War at its front.

Now, there is an African proverb which says that “There is always blood in the head of a tsetse fly”, which is to say that it would be extremely unrealistic, and dangerous so, for anyone to imagine that Putin and hard-boiled intelligence apparatchiks like him, with the bitter experience of the Cold War behind them, would allow “opportunistic” politicians like Zelensky (whom they considered as re “amateurs”, anyway, to conduct NATO right to the doorsteps of Russia.

The fruits of that mistake can be seen on television in news bulletin after news bulletin. Yes, there is no doubt that the Ukrainians are putting up a very courageous – and even ingenious – battle to safeguard their country's independence. But isn't the price they are being made to pay too high? So many innocent men, women and children killed; so many buildings utterly destroyed; and millions of refugees uprooted from their lives in Ukraine. As they seek new and hardship-laden lives in neighbouring countries, aren't they going to regret having had to suffer so much without being asked whether they were willing to exchange their peace for Ukrainian national pride?

A writer called Carl von Clausewitz once published a book that has become something of a “bible” on the origins of war. In the book, Vom Kriege [On War]he says: ‘War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means… For political aims are the end and war is the means, and the means can never be conceived without the end.’

I submit that the end, in this (as in many other instances) must be to better the conditions of existence of all the inhabitants of a given country – in this case, Ukraine.

By CAMERON DUODU