Will the Ukraine stalemate spawn climate catastrophe?

It is not every day that you hear two of the world's shrewdest senior voices in international affairs, George Soros and Henry Kissinger, at the opposite sides of the political spectrum, agree with each other.

Yet they both announced to the recent Davos 2022 World Economy Forum that a continued stalemate in the Ukrainian war is likely to result in catastrophic consequences for the world.

Soros emphasised that it would likely result in the world's failure to win the race on reigning in global warming so our planet would become uninhabitable.

Critics argue that the world has a choice: to continue pouring its scarce resources into the bottomless pit of unwinnable war or to reclaim global resources for winning the ever-tightening race for preventing climate calamity that could destroy our world civilisation.

George Soros wants Russia defeated ASAP. But Henry Kissinger sees no such defeat forthcoming. Rather he argues for giving up Ukrainian territory for peace.

This is an argument that challenges the current mainstream position in Western Democracies.

A counter argument is that to yield territory to Russia for peace would be giving in to the bullying of an enemy of Western Democracy, Putin. And that it would further embolden him and his ally Xi Jinping to grab further territories by force.

According to a recent survey only 10% of the Ukrainian population believes that they can give up territory and still retain their independence.

The critics argue that the West, led by the US, has an open-ended commitment to prolonging the war in Ukraine by supplying it with ever more weapons. The hope was that this, together with comprehensive sanctions, would force Putin to end his war.

But they say, there is no sign of Putin's backing off.

In their view, the West currently seems to refuse to contemplate three possible shocking developments in Ukraine.

One, that Putin may not lose.

Two, that the prolonged war could wipe Ukraine, as we have known it, off the face of this earth.

Three, that as the opponents sink their scarce resources into the bottomless pit of an unwinnable war, financially, the world is likely to lose its capacity to win the race to reign in global warming enough to save the Planet from climate catastrophe.

So, they say, everyone would then lose by the onset of an unliveable planetary climate.

They argue that Putin may not lose in Ukraine because China cannot afford him to lose. China has been bailing North Korea out for years, sabotaging the effectiveness of Western sanctions. They say that Xi Jinping knows that if Putin fails to win territory, his own ability to win Taiwan back by force, which seems to be necessary for his political survival, would also be questioned.

China has the capacity to prevent the economic collapse of Russia by blunting the effectiveness of the Western sanctions against it. It can provide enough aid to Russia's economy to survive, in return for Russian oil, coal, gas, grain and military technology.

And Putin knows that if he loses the war in Ukraine he is finished. Therefore he would continue fighting to win at any cost. Being a dictator he can hold his own country to ransom for much longer in order to win the war than Western governments can in democracies.

Critics point to the Vietnam war, Syria and Afghanistan. They contend that after the initial enthusiasm for fighting the so called 'just war' for democracy in Ukraine, the cost to the western populations may become so high that they would likely lose their appetite for further sacrifices.

At that point, the West may back off from keeping to try to maintain Ukraine's capacity to be able to resist their Russian invaders' more overwhelming forces and Ukraine could bleed to death, reminiscent of Syria.

So, they say, after all, Ukraine may lose the war and would end up far worse off than if it now was willing to give up some territory to save the rest of the country.

And tragically, they add, if the world's exhausted economies plunge into stagflation-based global depression, we all may also lose our capacity for saving the world by averting catastrophic rise in global warming.

They reckon that if the West was willing to bite the bullet to compromise now and take up Kissinger's suggestion and lean on Ukraine to trade land for peace, a worse catastrophe for Ukraine and the whole world may still be averted.

In doing so - they assert - both the Ukrainian government and Putin could save face.

Zelenskyy could claim the moral high ground by saying that he is not willing to see his whole country pulverised and to hold the whole world's future to ransom for a pyrrhic victory.

He could agree to plebiscites in Eastern Ukraine and let its predominantly Russian rebellious population go their merry ways. He could nod to Russia's already de facto annexation of Crimea as the West would not support him in any attempt to regain it by force because Russia now regards Crimea as part of its own sovereign territory, which NATO will not breach.

Zelenskyy could, as he already indicated his willingness, declare Ukraine's neutrality and undertake not to join Nato.

Putin in turn could save face by saying he retained Crimea and liberated the Russians of Eastern Ukraine.

This way, what is left of Ukraine could still be saved together with the world civilisation. They say that this would also give more time for democracies to get stronger so as to more effectively counter possible future attempts by Russia and Red China to grab further territories by force.

The critics are aware that the dominant Western view now is that yielding territory for peace would be a futile, Chamberlain-like appeasement attempt. But they argue that while the West keeps barracking for the Ukrainians to fight to the bitter end, it is not their lives and not their motherland that get further destroyed with every extra hour that this war lasts.