One of the reasons I am so upset about Vladimir Putin’s decision to start a massive war in Europe is that we human beings have giant challenges facing us on climate and biodiversity, and we require three things to succeed. The first is a high level of international cooperation backed by strong international organizations. The second is a lot of disposable wealth in developed countries that can be diverted to developing countries to help them do things in an environmentally sustainable way (something we did not do in our developing stage). And the third is basically an upgrade in human consciousness where we act in a more enlightened way that our contemporaries and ancestors. All three of these things are interrelated and co-dependent.
Putin is dividing the developed world, chewing up our disposable wealth, weakening our international organizations, and deliberately dumbing us down with relentless emotion-based propaganda and intellectual nonsense. That Russia is a wholly carbon-dependent country may help explain this, but it just makes matter worse.
We made a lot of good decisions after World War Two that laid the framework for the kind of systems we need. When this war in Ukraine is over, we’re going to have to repeat that experience and do an even better job of it. Time is running short, though, so the sooner Putin is knocked out of power the better. I’m convinced our species (and many other species, too) cannot survive in this kind of world with leaders behaving in the way Putin is behaving. His brand of politics and international relations has to be vanquished, just like fascism was vanquished in the 1940’s, so we can build a way forward that provides hope.
The problem with getting rid of dictators is that there nothing left that can fill the power vacuum.
Ukraine has to win, and soon. I don’t see that happening with Putin in/staying in power. Then we’ll have to deal with the aftermath of that.
That aftermath will not be pretty. One possibility is that the Russian Federation remains intact and gets a new dictator who is every bit as toxic as Putin. There are some folks who seem to be jockeying for the throne now. In that case, we’ll still be dealing with a nation with an imperialist zeitgeist and it’s a matter of time before another war gets started against (most likely) another former USSR nation, and maybe bide time until NATO finally collapses. Another possibility that I believe almost happened in the early 1990s would be a complete breakup of what we now know as Russia. That will bring with it its own difficulties – not the least of which is what to do with the nukes each of these new nations would possess. Personally, I’d rather deal with the latter scenario. Regardless, expect some significant chaos for a while. I doubt that there will suddenly be a democratic Russia emerge from this war. All that said, I agree with golack that Ukraine has to win as soon as possible, and its allies (US and fellow NATO members, EU, anyone else who’s stood up to support Ukraine so far) need to step up their material support (especially weapons/weapon systems/ammo) significantly from what’s been done so far. It’ll be very expensive, and that will hurt some feelings. It would have been less expensive if Russia had been forcefully stopped in 2014 when it began to invade Ukraine the first time, or even better in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia. Then again, the best time for handling a problem was the day before. The next best time is right now.