Should Ukraine try negotiation as Pope Francis recently suggested?

It's hard to know what the best strategy is for dealing with anger and violence in the world. Pope Francis has suggested Ukraine should strive to negotiate, versus continuing to fight to the bitter end. Others feel that this would be like the attempts at appeasement with the Nazis before World War II.

No one knows how history will judge any strategy tried. What will be the outcome? There are too many variables to predict. Violence and I also put most anger into the category of unfortunate aspects of humanity.

Some will say peace is the best strategy, but what if one is attacked? Is fighting back a better strategy to protect one's safety? What if one is the victim of violent crime or warfare?

Sometimes it might be better to fight back. Our officers of the peace; police, do usually have to carry guns. These aren't easy questions to answer.

Yes, striving toward non violence could be appeasement, who knows. Hindsight is better than foresight. We can look back on World War II and draw analogies to how that turned out. There's still some debate over what the best strategy would have been for dealing with that situation. Going forward it's even harder to know.

I think sometimes one does have to use force. On the other hand, maybe Ukraine should try and negotiate a peace short of trying to take back all the occupied territories; such as Crimea; for now at least. In the long run things could change for the better in Russia. At some point there will be a post Putin era, but who knows what the future will bring.

I don't have an ideal answer to these questions. I think our human propensity to violence creates situations where there is often no good answer. I think we do have to look at ourselves and try to figure out why humans are so prone to violence and I include anger as well. These problems persist all over the world and it seems like there is more and more warfare in various parts of the world; Sudan, Haiti, Israel/Gaza to name a few places in the news.

I also have to keep reminding myself that much of the world, if not most of the world, is still at peace.