Over the past eleven months, Ukraine’s people have suffered far too much killing and destruction. Most but by no means all of that devastation has been at the hands of the Russian military. (Residents of the country’s eastern provinces have been hammered hard by the Ukrainian military, over the course of several years now. Their fate has been almost ignored in Western media.)
How do we think about and respond to this suffering? Should we join the serried ranks of the Western punditocracy who endlessly urge that ever more and deadlier weaponry be sent to Ukraine? Or shouldn’t we, instead, be starting to call for a formalized, country-wide ceasefire in Ukraine… That is, an Armistice like the one that for 70 years now has preserved a broad ceasefire on the Korean peninsula and has allowed South Korea not just to survive but also to flourish.
(I realize the Koreas have not been totally peaceful since their Armistice went into force in 1953. North Korea has a belligerent, nuclear-armed leader who often seems very erratic. And South Korea’s president is now also talking about the possibility of going nuclear. But still, the Armistice has served all of Korea’s people—especially those in the South—and the cause of world peace, pretty well for many decades.)
The photo above shows the final signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement, in July 1953, in the North Korean village of Panmunjon. I’ll come back to the Koreas later. But for now, let’s circle back to the grinding—and globally very harmful—situation in Ukraine.
Continue reading “A Korea-style armistice for Ukraine?”