Russia-Ukraine conflict, lessons of peace
By HARRY KALABA—CF President
THE armed conflict between the Federation of Russia and Ukraine that clocked three years on February 24, 2025 must be a lesson to all of us to one thing—always prioritize diplomacy to resolve differences.
This is because after all these years of fighting, all we have witnessed is massive senseless loss of lives and property, with nothing productive to show for it.
Deaths on both sides are alarming at more than one million combined on both sides with more casualties on the Ukrainian side, which has a lesser population than Russia and a smaller army.
All this would have been avoided if Ukraine had discontinued its plans to join NATO which Russia believes was a threat to its sovereignty and national security as it would eventually entail armed NATO troops on Ukrainian soil in the backyard of Russia.
Let me be clear here that I take no sides in the on-going conflict except the side of peace and diplomacy, which I understand well having served my country Zambia as Foreign Affairs Minister.
This move to have NATO so close to the Russian border has been rejected by Russia from 1991 after the fall of the USSR by Mikhael Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and more vehemently by incumbent His Excellency Vladimir Putin.
The return to the Oval of President Donald Trump as no. 47 however, shines a line of hope in bringing this senseless conflict to an end, this is commendable.
If the Trump 2.0 method to find an end to the conflict works, we pray it does, it means that the loss of lives will end, the damage to infrastructure especially in Ukraine would end too.
It means the lines of production that have been disrupted especially in the agro sector will be re awakened and Ukraine would return to being an agro production leader yet again.
Before the conflict began, Ukraine was responsible for producing about 60 percent of the grain on the global level such as wheat, maize and rice to mention but a few.
Africa, our continent including parts of Asia were the biggest recipients of this grain whose production has drastically dropped since the conflict escalated.
You can’t engage in agriculture when farmers have become soldiers, neither can you produce fertiliser when the factories are producing arms.
It’s a pity though that countries like Zambia did not capitalise on Ukraine’s inability to agro produce during the conflict to expand our own agriculture sector.
I know it sounds callous but it is always a good thing in business to fill in a gaping hole, whether be it in the agriculture sector.
Zambia right now produces only 3 million metric tonnes of maize to feed 20 million people with 90 percent of the 750,000 square kilometres of land being arable, which is a shame.
At the upturn of the conflict in Ukraine, Zambia should have started to plan to expand maize production by up to 10 million metric tons of maize to feed more people and make more money. That is how business works.
Ukraine is a hundred thousand square kilometres smaller than Zambia, they grew more than 60 million tonnes of maize while we literally grew nothing, with or without a drought.
These are some of the gaps Citizens First (AF) seeks to fill in when we get into the power in 2026—use agriculture as one of the major tools of economic growth, create jobs and reduce poverty and not harvest only 3 million tonnes of maize annually.
It is heartening to note that since President Trump appeared on the scene, peace seems to be shining around the corner, we hope it is.
We don’t want a WWWIII President Trump has constantly warned against after three years of mayhem because wars only breed destruction.
As a peaceful country that we are that has never been at war in 60 years, we should look at Ukraine and say to ourselves that we do not want to walk into that blood path.
We should cherish our peace and embrace it because we do not want to become a war-ravaged Ukraine, Gaza, Congo, Somalia, or Sudan.
Peace once lost can almost never be retrieved.
In terms of inter-continental diplomacy, we must be courageous enough to stand up and speak against ills, the way South Africa recently did regarding the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Diplomacy sometimes means speaking out for the ‘right’ and weak against the ‘wrong’ strong because justice suffers when we choose to ‘abstain.’
With the Russia-Ukraine conflict peaking at three years in February, we pray we are seeing an end to this conflict and many others in the world.
We pray for peace in Zambia, especially as our beloved country nears a Presidential election like no other next year, diplomacy must reign above armed conflict of any kind.
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Source: Hon. Harry Kalaba—CF President and former Foreign Affairs Minister on the third anniversary of Russia-Ukraine conflict.
