Russia vs Ukraine. A conflict that goes far beyond a simple war.
We all have seen what happenned this early morning. What seem like a never starting story finally reaches what nobody wanted to: the beginning of a war. Just to be clear about this, a war is never beneficial for anyone; each involved part will suffer the lose of thousands of people, specially the Ukraine, the weaker side, that is giving away weapons to anybody that wants to fight till death to defend it's country. This kind of stories seem more like something from a century ago than from 2022. In a world where technology is evolving in an absolutely fast pace, we seem to never feel enough power with anyone.
This is not about blaming others, as the conflict will probably have mistakes made from both countries, Europe, USA.
What we don't realize is that, as we are living in a so connected world, where you can buy anything from China to bring it to your place in a matter of days or weeks, shortening this time lapse by lowering costs and developing more efficient ways to do business, this brings bad consequences to people that depend of other countries for their production. Ukraine in Europe is called the 'breadbasket of Europe', as it produces the total 10% of cereal for Europe, and to give another example, it gives almost 50% of this same raw material to Lebanon.
For sure, what will always matter most are the lives of such innocent people that are fighting for a cause they will probably don't even know. I saw this afternoon a profound quote about this conflict. This was, this war is made of young people from Russia that fight against Ukranian young people that don't even know each other so no possible hate is even imaginable, led by old men in both sides that hate each other, but that will never get a single scratch. Is this what we really want? We seem like we are still living in prehistory with this kind of mindset.
Wait, because you thought that's all? We are truly in a diplomatic conflict when you see how Europe won't make any attack probably because of these two facts:
- They don't want a new big war to start, so as they prefer to make fines to Putin in order to make assure he understands what is he facing (adding to the fact that the public debt for Russia is huge and backed in part by Europe)
- Germany don't want to stop with their energetic supply agreement of gas coming from Russia. Something somewhat ironic, as specially in Europe we are always fighting against non-renewable energies and investing large sums in natural sources, but we depend from arab countries as well as Russia in the case of Germany to be capable of surviving. As a industrial engineer, I fully support renewable energies, but changes are not made within a year or two, that's why energy sources as nuclear are vital to keep an independent production system and to not provoke this kind of issues. In western society we seem so aware of this issues but the most polluting cities are located in China, India and Pakistan. Do you still think that if we don't make a change in these countries we will save the world by just throwing our cans at the corresponding rubbish?
Source world's most polluting cities
Everyday that passes I hate more and more politics. I know that this is not the right way to think but we see how corruption, self-interests and a bigger control will make us slaves of these people. This is not about right or left, democrats or republicans, capitalism or comunism... We are talking about real human lives that the only "wrong thing" they did was borning in a country that sends them to war. Pacifism seems like an impossible challenge, but lets care more about lives and less of power. There are another ways of solving problems, even if both parts are not entirely satisfied. More and more it seems ridiculous to let a single person, no matter how smart, rich or whatever other good adjective you have, decide the future of millions of people. 20 of world's smartest people will never beat millions of people united.
None of us is perfect, but we can all can make a better future by just looking in the same direction and not at each other...
Cheers,
Feli