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The Ukraine war, or occupation, which Russian president Putin started on February 24, is continuing with no end in sight and upsetting all his calculations, despite a lapse of two and a half months. In the run-up to the Victory Day celebration on May 9, the world had expected Putin to reveal what is up his sleeve about the war during his address on the Victory Day the anniversary of the Soviet Union inflicting a crucial defeat on Nazi Germany in 1945. But the Russian president said little there except justifying his Ukraine attack. The persistent peace efforts by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres does not arouse any optimism either. All that happened recently is the resolution passed by the UN Security Council lending support to Guterres' peace efforts and seeking a peaceful solution to the conflict. And even in the resolution, the Security Council took care to avoid using a language with words like occupation, conflict or war, in order not to provoke Russia a country that can use its veto. Regardless of that, nearly every neutral onlooker is convinced that what Putin did against the sovereign state of Ukraine was nothing short of an unjustified aggression. But Putin could not, despite elaborate preparation by the world's leading military power, achieve his military goal of capturing Ukraine partially and making it subservient within weeks as planned. Not only that, as he himself admitted during his Victory Day speech, it gave an opportunity to NATO and the western powers to get a firm foothold in the Ukrainian soil. The Russian president claims that he took action against Ukraine in defence of the mother land. But, even granting that NATO's military units have not entered Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky has received state of the art weapons from the US and European nations; and he is hitting back at Russia using them. The Russian forces' could not capture the capital city of Kyiv even after employing all means at their command. That and the Russians abandoning of areas which they had previously captured, are seen by observers as a sign that Putin's wishes are not coming to fruition as expected. And he had to sacrifice about 25, 000 troops by now, on top of the loss of billions of roubles worth of equipment including the flagship carrier of Russia's Black Sea fleet, Moskva.
Putin claims that his fight is to liberate Ukraine from neo-Nazis, and the goal is to defeat the attempt to revive Hitler's Nazi gang in Ukraine, which the Soviet Union had annihilated in 1945. And as Putin's adviser Valerey Fedayev said in an interview "The Ukrainian nationalist battalions, in particular the Azov Battalion, were concentrated in Mariupol and the Azov Steel Plant. These battalions are very motivated, because they consist of actual Nazis. They study Nazi ideology, one of their thought leaders is Hitler himself". If that is true, or if there is some truth in it, a question arises: do today's Russia and its protagonists in Europe sincerely oppose Nazism and Fascism, which caused the Second World War that has given nothing to mankind except untold misery? If so, are Russia or its opponents really concerned about the ultra-racial nationalism and the global war that will become inevitable when that trend intensifies? Even during his Victory Day speech, Putin was vocal about ultra-Russian nationalism.
Coming to Europe, Emmanuel Macron, who is active against Russia from the side of EU and who was recently re-elected President of France, represents extreme right-wing nationalism. If Macron loses the upcoming National Assembly election, the winner will be more firebrand far-right nationalists. Opponents of Nazism and Fascism, whoever they be, are bound to stay above narrow racist-nationalistic stream of thought and instead subscribe to universal humanity. For the world to achieve liberation from wars too, power should come to the hands of lovers of mankind. But that is not the path which Russia's Putin, Ukraine's Zelensky and most European rulers have chosen to tread. At any rate, the situation of Ukraine military engagement continuing indefinitely, causing considerable hardship to countries including India, should be brought to an end at any cost. If India which carefully stopped short of taking sides in the issue, has any diplomatic finesse, this is the juncture for it to prove it. For India to not only get prices of oil, wheat and other essential goods to come down, but also to end the loss of lives and misery, there is no way other than bringing Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky to a round table and get them to sign an end to the war.