After crossing with his army into Asia, Alexander the Great stopped at Gordium (in modern-day Turkey). He approached the famous Gordian knot — a tangled mass of bark tying an ox cart to a pole, so intricate and tight that no one could unravel it. When told that anyone who could untie the mess would rule all of Asia, Alexander simply pulled out his sword and cut through it — solving the problem and fulfilling the prophecy.

The Ukraine war may be our Gordian knot, but — in our current nuclear age — it is dangerous to cut rather than unravel it.

A European Stalingrad

No one knows exactly how many people have been killed in the Ukraine war, which has now lasted four years and eight months — longer than World War II in the Pacific, the American Civil War, or World War I. There is still no end in sight. Estimates of the human toll vary widely, since it is in the interest of both sides to exaggerate the losses of the enemy while under-reporting their own casualties.

Nonetheless, most sources agree that more than half a million have died. Other estimates put the total fatalities closer to one million. At least another million and a half have been wounded or are missing. Some calibrate well over 30,000 total civilian deaths, the overwhelming majority of them Ukrainians. On average, well over 1,500 Ukrainians and Russians are being killed or wounded each day.

To outside observers, the war appears different from most other current armed conflicts, in which religion or ethnicity is the cause, or at least the force multiplier, of the conflict. Despite Ukrainian political independence, both sides are ethnically similar and — when it comes to almost half of Ukraine's prewar population — linguistically identical. Both sides are indistinguishable in superficial appearance. Both are predominantly Orthodox Christian. They fought alongside each other in World War II and often shared a common history.

In February 2022, Vladimir Putin planned to decapitate Ukraine with a lightning strike on Kyiv, thereby bringing the entire country within days into his envisioned new Russian empire. That operation, reminiscent of the "Thunder Runs" to capture Baghdad in 2003 with a shock-and-awe wave, utterly failed in the face of remarkable Ukrainian courage and savvy.

What followed, however, has become even more nightmarish than the death cauldrons at Verdun or Stalingrad.

Ukraine's economy is ruined. A fourth of the population has been displaced. Perhaps 15 percent has fled abroad. The Zelenskyy government relies on Western aid and the heroism of its troops for survival. The latter have established a nearly impenetrable line of defense in the contested Donetsk Oblast, one of the richest and most urbanized regions of Ukraine.

If the Russians were to break through that line, there would be little left to stop them from marching on Kyiv, and thus little to prevent the collapse of Ukraine's entire resistance. Yet for now, the Russians, in tragically ironic fashion, are playing the role of the trapped German aggressors at Stalingrad: a hemorrhaging army that can........

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