Mark Sleboda’s outlook on the future of Ukraine and humanity: war or peace?

“On the Barricades” s05e31

To assess the changing balance of forces and situation in Ukraine, “On the Barricades” has the pleasure of bringing repeat-guest Mark Sleboda onto the show for a two-part release. Mark is a former US Navy specialist, military expert, and academic who attended the London School of Economics before becoming a senior lecturer at Moscow State University.

After our first episode’s dissection of events on the ground in Ukraine, in this second episode, hosts Maria Cernat and Boyan Stanislavski take a dive with Mark into some broader philosophical and human-existential questions raised by the current reality in Ukraine and globally. We begin with the question of whether peace is possible in the long or short term – the chances that the conflict will freeze any time soon at a bargaining table. With war as with peace, the question is on whose terms? And what drives war and the mass support we see for it anyway– the system enslaving us to the profit motive or some more basic human condition and prone-ness to othering? Speaking on existential-scale problems humanity faces and what they actually look like: there is not only the potential of World War 3, but also the looming threat of climate crisis, another area of Mark’s interest. War and added impacts of climate change will make the current energy crisis and impending food crisis in Europe and elsewhere a drastically dire, prolonged situation. But is it hopeless?