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Another cost that may be important to Western leaders is the impact a Ukrainian defeat might have upon food security for the rest of the world, in particular developing countries. Higher global food prices, or the risk of Putin restricting food supplies may be very costly for the West.

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I dont understand what Mark H's comment about allowing the agreement that Ukraine and Russia had reached before the war. I am not aware of any agreement, or any way that if there had been an agreement, 'the West' could allow or disallow it. Surveys of Ukrainians show the vast majority of its citizens would like Ukraine to be part of NATO. It isn't, nor is it likely to become part of NATO unless that was part of an eventual peace deal with Russia under which Ukraine felt comfortable with some redrawing of boundaries linked to a real future security guarantee (so something totally unlike the 1994 Budapest Memorandum). Also, mystified by the reference to a 2014 coup which 'we' provoked. Those of us who visited by Maidan at the end of 2013 or early 2014 would surely not have described what later happened as a 'coup' - Ukraine was left in a power vacuum when the hapless, corrupt and incompetent Yanukovich (who together with his mentors in Moscow was responsible for provoking the mess in the first place) chose to get in his chopper in the dead of night and beat it out of Kyiv. A vacuum which was cruelly exploited by Moscow to make mischief in Crimea and then violence in Donbas, while the free world was still waking up and scratching its collective head. Had President Obama, as the leader of the only country with the power to do so, put a stop to the 'little green men' escapade in its infancy and not allowed the subversion of Crimea then indeed there would have been 700,000 fewer deaths and the avoidance of destruction in Ukraine and Russia.

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Well said. Remarkable how people still try and make excuses for Russia’s invasion. How was Ukraine threatening Russia with anything? NATO was no threat - just prior to Euromaydan the last U.S. tank brigades had left Europe. Where has NATO been encroaching on Russian territory - all the evidence is Russia has been the invader/colonial power - Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia.

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Nonsense. If the West had allowed the agreement that Ukraine and Russia had reached before the war: there would have been no war, Ukraine would not be a member of NATO, the eastern provinces (primarily Russian populations) would have autonomy, the Russian naval bases in Crimea (where they have been for over a century) would remain, and additionally there would be several million fewer refugees, Ukraine would not have had it's economy and infrastructure destroyed, there would have been over 700,000 fewer deaths. Is that such a terrible outcome? And of course, if we had not provoked the 2014 coup and constantly pushed for NATO to surround western Russia, all this tragic destruction might have been avoided. [All the hysteria about Russia steamrolling through Europe is absurd. Look at what it has cost them to advance a few miles, and what do they have to gain? And as a mental exercise, one might reflect on whether JFK was right to object to Russia placing missiles in Cuba, and how that compares with Putin objecting to Ukraine joining NATO, something in fact that we had promised not to do.]

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Echoing Antony's comment above in a slightly different vector, the other collosal loser in this particular terrible scenario is any hope of restricting our global carbon hungry economic machine to attempt to stabilise the effects of climate change..

There was a study I can mo longer find which demonstrated the carbon cost of the Syrian civil war as balanced by Green efforts in Western Europe; essentially a drop in the ocean..

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