It seems that Mikhail Shishkin is, in effect, telling us all that we must prepare for a third world war (The west is trying to quietly forget the war in Ukraine. It does so at its own peril, 21 August). To take that route would be to demonstrate not courageous and necessary resolve, but sheer, pitiless madness.
History may demonstrate many things, but when it ignores current realities it is, to say the least, dangerous. This time the global deaths would not stop at the 70 million who died during the second world war, but would, with or without the almost inevitable use of nuclear weapons, destroy our planet. We are already well on our way to extinction through terminal climate disaster. And that is already being brought closer by the ecological cost of the terrible destruction in Ukraine: the smashing of buildings and infrastructure and the devastation of land, and the carbon cycle of the manufacture and use of the weapons deployed by both sides.
