Certainly, it is important to make peace in Ukraine. It is important that “the dying” is stopped. Ukrainians are the first to want to stop the dying. They want peace. But it matters how, it matters to achieve not just some kind of peace, but a real kind of peace.
The war does not happen just on the front line. It happens in the occupied territories of Ukraine just as well. It happens to the refugees whose homes are occupied, to the children that have been abducted, to the people still living in occupied Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Russia is still torturing, violating, murdering and ethnically “cleansing” people in these areas, in addition to waging war against what remains of Ukraine. Remember Bucha.
If you want to stop “the dying”, it has to be stopped completely and sustainability. The new Russian empire under Putin is a murder machine. Ukraine will not be safe unless a peace can be made that is just, that returns Ukraine to the 1991 borders, that forces Russia to pay for the damage caused, and that also helps transform currently fascist Russia into a state that is no longer a danger to the world nor to its own people.
Let us not forget either “the dying” that is brought upon Russians. Putin is deliberately having his own people killed. He is erasing, quite consciously, the generation that got used to more or less Western freedoms, to a hint of democracy, to a hint of a rule of law. These people are being sent into the “meat grinder.” This is not an accident. Putin — in true totalitarian manner — is trying to raise the “new man”, just as his Socialist and Fascist predecessors (If this combination of allegedly opposite ideologies confuses you, I refer you to Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies). The “Westernized” generations need to go before a new generation of victims can be raised up. In that, Russia, China, North Korea and Iran are united ideologically. Furthermore, Putin has been reducing the numbers of the ethnic minority population in Russia by drafting and recruiting them first (If you ask, how do I know all this? I grew up under people that thought like Putin).
It is important to end the war. For this, it is important for Ukraine to win, and for Russia to lose. Please listen to the Eastern European leaders who have called out Putin for what he is, please listen to Putin’s propagandists and what they are saying. Russia is just getting started. It needs to be stopped.
Peace cannot be divorced from justice.
Ceterum censeo Ucrainam esse defendam. Слава Україні!
Erratic Attempts 