No winners in Russia-Ukraine war, but an opportunity for India

The war has not gone well for either party. The Russian blitzkrieg — with enormous lines of tanks crawling menacingly toward the capital city, with vastly extended supply lines — failed in the early attempts to take Kyiv and topple the Ukrainian regime. The Ukrainians, whose President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has emerged as the main symbol of resistance to what they have successfully projected as blatant aggression, have been able to hold on to their main cities. Western firepower, cash, intelligence and training have been successful in slowing down the Russian advance, confined so far to the East and the South. The war that most expected to come to a quick resolution has turned out to be a war of attrition, reminiscent of the brutal trench warfare and artillery duels of the First World War, evocative of the horrors that Erich Maria Remarque describes in All Quiet on the Western Front. The media brings the horrors of the war into daily life, reviving living memory of the wholesale destruction of cities in the Second World War and the subliminal fear of the depredations of the Red Army in occupied Germany and Nazi atrocities in Russia and France.

The war in Ukraine has rung the death knell of globalisation. Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany — a reluctant war leader who had previously been a conscientious objector — has now been goaded into radically altering German policy with regard to military spending, pledging 100 billion euros into upgrading the armed forces and sending German weapons to Ukraine. He has aptly described the current phase in world politics as a Zeitenwende — a “watershed”, the change of an era. The weaponisation of trade by both the West and Russia, euphemistically described as “sanctions”, are actually war in other forms, which still cost lives. The wholesale confiscation of assets in Western banks and financial institutions and the very public delivery of lethal weapons take the edge off the moral rhetoric of war to regain peace — they are steadily undermining trust in global institutions. Inflation caused by the sanctions has started biting into the budgets of low-income households all over the world. And rising gas prices have already started inducing fears of a winter of discontent in Europe. A less visible effect of the sanctions is the impact on the environment. Substituting oil and gas with coal is a potentially dangerous trade-off which will turn the clock back on the painstaking efforts to rein in global warming.

Except for the military-industrial complex of the United States and its global subsidiaries, which are cashing in on the vast sums of taxpayer money made available to them by western governments, there are no winners in this war. One can already discern the wavering of public support in continental Europe for the continuation of the war and a growing divergence among Germany, France and the UK. For the war machine in the United States, a proxy war against Russia, with the added advantage of support from NATO and Western countries which it did not have in its earlier efforts, is a golden opportunity. But as things stand, NATO, aware of the very real threat of Russia’s nuclear option, cannot do more. And Russia, in possession of territory won at enormous cost, cannot do less. The tug of war between the US-led supply of arms and intelligence and the resourceful and resilient Russia, with its own memories of similar challenges in the Second World War, can only drag on, indefinitely.

The time for resuming negotiations is now. There might be a window of opportunity for India, which has consistently held dialogue and diplomacy as the only solution, to take the initiative towards mediation. Under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1953, post-independence India, a fledgling in world politics, had stepped in as a mediator in the Korean conflict. With the dexterity that current Indian diplomacy has shown – successfully repatriating vast numbers of Indians from Ukraine at the outbreak of the war, keeping a line open to Russia and the United States, and retaining its strategic room to manoeuvre — Modi’s India has the potential to get the warring parties to the negotiation table. Some Ukrainian and Russian lives might still be saved.

The writer is Emeritus professor, Heidelberg University and Adjunct Professor, Dublin City University.