Ukraine war weighs heavy as apocalyptic mood shrouds Davos
The impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dominated a delayed and slimmed-down World Economic Forum this year but it took George Soros to articulate what many of those making the trip to the Swiss Alps had been thinking.
Davos would not be Davos without a broadside from the 91-year-old philanthropist and former speculator, but the conflict in eastern Europe prompted his most apocalyptic warning yet.
“The invasion may have been the beginning of the third world war and our civilisation may not survive it,” he said.
Others were voicing similarly dark thoughts – some publicly, some privately. So much so, that at times it felt as if the meeting was taking place not in May 2022 but in July 2014 or August 1939, times past when the world has stood on the brink of the precipice.
The historian Adam Tooze said: “The war dominates everything. The nuclear escalation risk is not being priced in. This doesn’t feel like cold war. It’s hard to think of a time during the cold war when the US openly announced its policy was to eliminate the capacity of Russia to take independent military action.”
Similar sentiments were expressed by a senior policymaker who pointed out that a global pandemic had been unthinkable in early 2020, a near-coup in Washington incited by Donald Trump had been unthinkable in January 2021 and a war between Russia and Ukraine had been unthinkable at the start of 2022. “Why should we think the unthinkable ended with the start of the war?”
Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of Nato, said the west’s military build-up in eastern Europe was designed to deter Vladimir Putin rather than provoke him, but even if Russia resists the temptation to push the nuclear button it has other ways to escalate the conflict.
Solidarity
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