The Urgency of Stopping the War

The war in Ukraine has been taking increasingly dangerous turns toward a military showdown with Russia, with actions that go beyond the conventional warfare to which it has been limited until now.

The mid-September sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline network, which transports Russian fuel to western Europe, was an ominous first sign of that tendency. As a result of the sabotage, the supply of fuel via the pipeline was suspended indefinitely.

Russia and several EU and NATO countries have been trading scarcely veiled accusations about the responsibility for those attacks, which would suggest an extension of the war beyond the territories of the two countries directly involved.

Furthermore, after an intense weeks-long Ukrainian counteroffensive in the east and south of the country, areas invaded in February, an explosion partially destroyed the Kerch bridge, the main communication route between Russia and Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014.

Vladimir Putin’s government immediately accused Kyiv of being behind the bombing and responded by raining down missiles on the capital and other Ukrainian cities.

The conflict took on a new intensity, with many civilian casualties and vast destruction in Ukraine as well as in the Russian-speaking territories recently annexed to the Russian Federation by the Kremlin. As this happened, the exchanges of warnings and threats between Moscow and Washington about the use of nuclear weapons proliferated.

It is clear, then, that the war developing in southeastern Europe has been moving closer to the point at which the armies of Russia and the Western alliance could encounter each other face to face. This would put the world on the brink of a third world war, with all that that implies.

In this grim panorama, hostile speech is proliferating, and moderate voices are becoming scarce. Independently of the responsibility of the Kyiv government for aggression toward the Russian-speaking peoples of eastern Ukraine, and of the authorities in Moscow for launching a full-fledged invasion of a neighboring country, and beyond the debates about crimes against humanity in the course of this conflict, it is clear that the war must be stopped and that all diplomatic measures available to the international community must be brought to bear in this effort.

We must not overlook the fact that until now, the only immediate and unconditional peace proposal for the parties has been put forward by the government of Mexico, and it was done in a spirit of conformity with the guiding principles of our country’s foreign policy.

If the U.S. and Europe do not support the initiative, other governments should move it forward in order to introduce an urgent and indispensable element of rationality and good will into this war, which has become a prelude to a global nightmare.