What began as a civil war inside Ukraine is now a proxy war between NATO and Russia which has serious potential to become a nuclear war. The question for everyone, and not least everyone else, is whether and how that can be avoided. To think this through, it is necessary to confront a basic feature of a world with nuclear weapons: nuclear-armed states are a fact of life, and they will fight to defend the interests they see as vital. Unless this is respected, nuclear Armageddon becomes likely. This is a very unpleasant reality, but moral judgements on events in Ukraine that do not recognise it are worthless.
To see the force of this, we need to pay due attention to the contrast between what happened in Cuba in 1962 and what has happened in Ukraine between 2014 and 2023. In 1962, after the Americans’ failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, Khruschev agreed to Castro’s request to site nuclear weapons there. The US saw that as threatening its security, and Kennedy made it clear that the US was ready to go to war to prevent it. Nuclear war seemed imminent. Through ‘back channel’ negotiations, Khruschev eventually agreed to remove all missiles from Cuba. In return, Kennedy promised not to invade again and secretly agreed to withdraw US nuclear missiles from Turkey.
In the case of Ukraine, the anti-Russian nationalist government that came to power in Kyiv in 2014, besides precipitating a civil war in the Russia-oriented Donbas region of Ukraine, pressed for Ukraine to join NATO. Russia, however, had made it very clear from 2008 onwards that Ukraine joining NATO—which would involve the siting of nuclear weapons even closer to Moscow than Cuba is to Washington—would be a threat to its national security that it would never accept.
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