Will the Ukraine stalemate spawn climate catastrophe?

It is not every day that you hear two of the world's shrewdest senior voices in international affairs, George Soros and Henry Kissinger, at the opposite sides of the political spectrum, agree with each other.

Yet they both announced to the recent Davos 2022 World Economy Forum that a continued stalemate in the Ukrainian war is likely to result in catastrophic consequences for the world.

Soros emphasised that it would likely result in the world's failure to win the race on reigning in global warming so our planet would become uninhabitable.

Critics argue that the world has a choice: to continue pouring its scarce resources into the bottomless pit of unwinnable war or to reclaim global resources for winning the ever-tightening race for preventing climate calamity that could destroy our world civilisation.

George Soros wants Russia defeated ASAP. But Henry Kissinger sees no such defeat forthcoming. Rather he argues for giving up Ukrainian territory for peace.

This is an argument that challenges the current mainstream position in Western Democracies.

A counter argument is that to yield territory to Russia for peace would be giving in to the bullying of an enemy of Western Democracy, Putin. And that it would further embolden him and his ally Xi Jinping to grab further territories by force.

According to a recent survey only 10% of the Ukrainian population believes that they can give up territory and still retain their independence.

The critics argue that the West, led by the US, has an open-ended commitment to prolonging the war in Ukraine by supplying it with ever more weapons. The hope was that this, together with comprehensive sanctions, would force Putin to end his war.

But they say, there is no sign of Putin's backing off.

In their view, the West currently seems to refuse to contemplate three possible shocking developments in Ukraine.

One, that Putin may not lose.