I have fears over the crisis in Ukraine, but not those of most other people. My fears revolve around the moral high ground that its people now hold, but are in danger of losing over the coming months and years.
Thus far, the Ukrainian conflict has unfolded in much the same way as did the Syrian Civil War. If the reader can recollect, in the early days of the Arab Spring, Bashar Al-Assad and his Russian masters were the epitome of evil. Nations and peoples the world over condemned their butchery, and rightly so.
However, in the subsequent years, two main demographic trends changed the moral landscape of the Middle East. The first was the refugee crisis, in which millions of moderate Syrians fled their nation for happier lands. And the second was the influx on tens of thousands of Islamic radicals into the war zone, who came to fight the Russians.
As a result, the population of Syria was gradually radicalized, until one day three years into the conflict, the scales finally tipped, and the Islamic State was founded. The rest of the world, taken by surprise, quickly understood that this new polity posed a much greater threat to human civilization even than the dictatorships of the Middle East, and so the world humbly admitted its mistake, and united against the threat posed by Islamic Fundamentalism.
What does this have to do with Ukraine? To begin with, the exact same demographic trends that befell Syria a decade ago are also very much present in the shaping of Ukrainian politics. Millions of moderate Ukrainians are fleeing the conflict, while tens of thousands of radicalized individuals are flooding into the conflict zone to fight Russian aggression. And again, the fear is that at some point the moral scales will eventually tip, and Ukraine will become more of a threat to the world even than Russia.
Nothing is inevitable, and the above eventuality is by no means written in stone. It is simply a contingency the world should be cautiously appraising, as well as preparing for.
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