“Ukraine – Russia”

For the last three decades, Europe’s leaders have pursued a noble strategy to prevent conflict using trade, aid and diplomacy. But their reliance on soft power has had an unintended consequence: it has left them divorced from reality.

Soft-power tools are honourable and often pragmatic methods of conflict prevention and, at times, resolution. Just look at America’s Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after the Second World War, or the foreign aid provided today by the wealthy West to smaller and poorer nations.

There can be no greater demonstration of the massive failure — and the paralyzing contradictions and disconnect — revealed this week between two branches of the United Nations that allegedly serve to protect and assure peace and prosperity around the world. One branch is the United Nations Security Council, allegedly dedicated to international peace and security. The other UN operation is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was created to ”provide policymakers with regular scientific assessments on climate change, its implications and potential future risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation options.”

Humanity just got dealt another blow with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Only thinking of the human cost is unbearable. But the agri-food sector has already been impacted by the conflict in more ways than one.

Hundreds of Canadians have already offered to fight for Ukraine against Russian invasion forces, just two days after the country formally put out the call for volunteers, a top Ukrainian diplomat said Tuesday.

The United Nations has voted overwhelmingly for a resolution deploring Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and called for the immediate withdrawal of its forces, in a global expression of outrage that highlighted Russia’s increasing isolation.

In an emergency session of the UN’s general assembly, 141 of the 193 member states voted for the resolution, 35 abstained and five voted against.

The resolution, which was co-sponsored by 94 countries, said the UN “deplores in the strongest terms the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine”. It demanded that “the Russian Federation immediately cease its use of force against Ukraine” and “immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces”.

Roughly a hundred years ago, another Russian tyrant — Vladimir Lenin — sent overwhelming forces streaming across the border of Poland.

The formerly subjugated Polish nation was attempting to resurrect itself as a sovereign state following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires as a result of the First World War. Lenin anticipated the collapse of the fledgling republic and expected his troops to drive straight through Warsaw and export the Russian Revolution to Berlin and points west. Observers didn’t give the Polish David a chance against the Russian Goliath.

Weeping Russian prisoners of war have said they had no idea they were being sent to invade Ukraine and were used like ‘cannon fodder’ by commanders who threw them into battle against ‘peaceful people defending their territory’ after Vladimir Putin’s forces took heavy losses in the opening days of the conflict.

‘This is not our war. Mothers and wives, collect your husbands. There is no need to be here,’ an injured soldier sat in front of a Ukrainian flag was filmed saying. Other footage showed handcuffed Russian prisoner crying, while saying: ‘They don’t even pick up the corpses, there are no funerals’.

Ukraine says Russia has lost 5,840 soldiers in the opening days of the conflict – some of its fastest losses since the Second World War, if the figure proves accurate – with Putin’s men suffering a series of embarrassing defeats as they tried to pull off a quick victory but instead met with stiff resistance from Ukrainian forces.

Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. intelligence had predicted a blistering assault by Moscow that would quickly mobilize the vast Russian air power that its military assembled in order to dominate Ukraine’s skies.

But the first six days have confounded those expectations and instead seen Moscow act far more delicately with its air power, so much so that U.S. officials can’t exactly explain what’s driving Russia’s apparent risk-averse behavior.

Russia aims to erase Ukraine, its history and its people, the besieged country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said, as Moscow, in the face of international isolation, claimed to have seized its first large city amid continued heavy fighting.

A Russian defence ministry spokesperson said its forces had taken control of the strategically important city of Kherson on the Black Sea, with nearly 250,000 inhabitants. Local authorities said the port and train station had been captured overnight but denied the city had been occupied.

Ukraine: Putin’s miscalculations could see him strike harder

Ukraine has fought back much harder during the first week than Vladimir Putin expected, or very probably than his generals promised him, it would. But these are still the early stages of what could be a very nasty war.

Putin must have hoped that a few days after Russian forces invaded, Kyiv would have fallen. And he surely expected that Western countries, cowed and divided, would have accepted that he had reclaimed a territory that he says is historically part of Russia.

None of this has happened.

Ukrainians say they are fighting on in southern city of Kherson

Ukrainians said they were fighting on in the first sizeable city Russia claimed to have seized, while Moscow stepped up its lethal bombardment of major population centres that its invasion force has so far failed to tame.

With Moscow having failed in its aim of swiftly overthrowing Ukraine’s government after nearly a week, Western countries are worried that it is switching to new, far more violent tactics to blast its way into cities it had expected to easily take.

#Ukraine: In the vicinity of #Nikolaev, a MT-LBV (Or vehicle based on it) was abandoned by Russian troops, also leaving behind an AGS-17 automatic grenade launcher, 6x RPG-26, PG-7L, 2x RPG-7, and other ammo. pic.twitter.com/Bf8bvrKTuJ

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 2, 2022

… Putin’s attack on Ukraine will have more serious repercussions than rising gas prices, wavering confidence that the United States can act as the world’s policeman or even the dismantling of a sovereign nation. It represents a shock to the system for the cozy “rules-based international order” that has for decades reassured the West that things like naked aggression are relics of the past.

The Russian leader’s actions express essential and unalterable truths about human nature, which we ignore at our peril

When Vladimir Putin sent Russian forces into Crimea in 2014, then-Secretary of State John Kerry professed bewilderment that such imperial aggression could happen in the modern age. It was like something out of “the 19th century.” Kerry’s reaction to Putin’s recent invasion of Ukraine was equally baffled, as the patrician American diplomat lamented that the war would distract Putin from working with him on climate change. Common to both reactions was the astonishment that the material calculations and preoccupations of Western democracies might be blown away by a resurgence of old-fashioned tyrannical ambition.