I write this piece as someone who works in armed conflict transformation, and is committed to non-violent solutions to conflict. I also write it because I am saddened by how willing some British media commentators are to write off the independence of Ukraine, a major European country – as if this will somehow solve the problems that country, and the international community, faces.
The current situation is not the start of a war between Russia and Ukraine. The two countries have been at war since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and invaded Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. There has been continued fighting on Ukraine’s eastern border since then.
The present worry is that the build-up of more than 100,000 Russian troops on Ukraine’s eastern border, combined with extensive Russian military exercises in Belarus on its northern border, as well as naval activity in the Black Sea to the south, herald the possibility of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia. There is no inevitability to this. Tensions have been very high in the past, including in March and April last year.
