By Conor Kelly
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022 at least 46,000 people have died, with an estimated 2,729 casualties amongst Ukrainian civilians. Despite all this, many students don’t seem to care much about the ongoing conflict in Eastern Europe. In their defense, why should they? The war is happening thousands of miles away and seemingly has little immediate impact on the life of the average American high school student. Now, a little over two months into the conflict, we can see that it has had a very real impact on international politics, as well as the economy in the US, affecting the prices of various goods for the average American. This conflict could have a huge impact on the future of world politics and is having an immediate impact on markets and the world economy. Students should care about what is going on in Ukraine, and here’s why.
First of all, the economic impact of the war on the US is clear. Russia geographically sits on top of a valuable store of oil, allowing the country to profit hugely off of oil exports to other countries like China and the US. In order to discourage and economically weaken Russia as a response to their invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden placed a ban on importing Russian oil into the US. This has contributed to rising gas prices in the country, which were already high due to supply chain issues relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, with things like labor shortages and supply and demand shocks stemming from COVID-related lockdowns and restrictions. On a worldwide scale, the war with Ukraine is having disastrous consequences for neighboring countries to Ukraine, receiving hundreds of thousands of refugees looking for sanctuary from the Russian invasion. As of April 6.2 million Ukrainian refugees had entered Poland alone, with refugees fleeing to other countries such as Belarus in droves. Because of the rapid influx of refugees entering these countries, economies are struggling to keep up with the increased demand for goods caused by hundreds of thousands of people coming into the country.
The second main issue with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is it breaks a streak of relative peace in Europe beginning with the end of World War II. The latter half of the 1900s saw a worldwide culture of economic globalization permeate, leading to widespread relative global peace, no wars have been fought in the last 70 years that have been even remotely as destructive as the two World Wars at the beginning of the 20th century, and almost no conflict between neighboring European countries has taken place since the end of World War II. This is why the invasion of Ukraine is so alarming. It has contradicted years of peace in Europe that organizations like the UN and EU have worked so hard to maintain. Aside from this, the US has been teetering on the edge of getting directly involved in military conflict within Ukraine, with Ukrainian President Vladmir Zelenski calling for the US to provide a “no-fly zone” in Ukrainian airspace that would almost certainly cause American fighter pilots to come into direct air combat with Russian pilots, which could easily spiral into all-out war between Russia and the US. The main reason we should worry about this prospect has to do with Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Russia possesses the largest stock of nuclear weapons in the world. A war with Russia would presumably involve these massively destructive weapons.
The war with Ukraine is incredibly important and everyone should be paying attention to it, it could dramatically change our futures.