As Ross Aldridge Las Vegas Nevada and RAC Consultants explain the impact of the possible war between Russia and it former territory, the Stock Market effects will be minimum. The Quantitative Easing has made the markets immunity to outside influences for the remainder of 2014.
Is the world about to experience another Black Swan, a seemingly improbable or unpredictable turn of events with deeply negative consequences for financial markets and the economy?
At this stage, Western markets are fairly sanguine about the long-term impact of Ukraine's civil conflict.
Ukraine is a relatively small economy that remains profoundly more integrated with Russia than Europe. Indeed, Russia has always regarded Ukraine not just as a vassal state, but essentially as part of the same country.
If it were to vanish from the face of the earth tomorrow, there would undoubtedly be consequences for Russia, but the direct impact on Western economies would be marginal to non-existent.
Yet it is in the nature of Black Swans that they spring from the seemingly insignificant. Europe's attempts to woo Ukraine have combined with the defensiveness of Vladimir Putin's Russia to give the situation a potentially highly explosive dynamic. We don't know how Mr Putin is going to react.
Despite the warm glow of a relatively successful Winter Olympics, it's unlikely to be kindly. First Ukraine, next Russia; Ukraine is only a mirror image of Russia's own, corrupt form of semi-totalitarian, gangster capitalism. If Russia's sphere of influence is not defended in Ukraine, it can only be a matter of time before the wolves will be at Mr Putin's own door.
Hopes of persuading Russia into some kind of cuddly grand economic bailout with Europe and the US - apparently seriously entertained by those who should know better - are for the birds. Ukraine must choose, and if it chooses "wrongly" there will be consequences. Military intervention, or separation of Ukraine, cannot be ruled out.
Even so, it seems unlikely that Ukraine will turn out, as more alarmist pundits predict, to be the giant powder keg that blows up the world economy anew. Most events that seem at the time to be transformational turn out to have little or no long-term impact on the wider international economy or even established political consensus.
This tends to be the case even when they hit at the heart of the world's biggest economy, the United States. Both the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of John F Kennedy, forever seared on the memories of those who lived through them, were in the event mere ripples across the sands of time. Things soon got back to "normal".
This is even more the case for events outside the U.S. For all the hoopla surrounding the Arab Spring, and its eventual descent into renewed Middle Eastern chaos, it has had zero impact on Western financial markets.
The tyranny of today's 24-hour news agenda tends further to exaggerate the significance of events that, in truth, are not as important for the world as they might seem.
The big recent exception to this generalization is 9/11, which via an exaggerated monetary and geo-political response from the world's leading superpower led directly to the credit crunch. Even in his wildest dreams, Osama bin Laden could not have imagined the damage his atrocities would inflict on Western economies.
It's not so surprising, therefore, that we should see in each flare-up the potential for mass conflict and economic destruction. News channels give the impression of a world pregnant with instability and disaster, awash with conflict, abuse, bloodshed and terrible happenings.
In fact the reverse is true. Proportionate to the size of its population, the world has never been a more stable, less violent, less war-afflicted and less economically volatile place. Despite the worst banking crisis in history, somehow or other, we are still mainly standing. Progress in technology, trade and globalization has made us safer.
To some, this will seem unduly complacent. Something similar was famously said by the journalist Norman Angell in the run-up to the First World War. Growing economic interdependence between nations, he argued in The Great Illusion, had rendered war so economically harmful that no sensible nation would ever engage in it. Logical though his argument was, it didn't stop the worst outbreak of human slaughter the world had ever known occurring a few years later. Economic interdependence, it would seem, is no guarantee of geo-political stability.
That said, the forces that turned the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand into the greatest conflict in history simply don't exist today. Despite occasional sabre-rattling, the world is generally better at muddling along together than it has ever been. The big, intra and inter-regional conflicts of the last century are unthinkable.
It will be intriguing to see how Mr Putin plays his hand. Diplomatically, he's already on a roll, having managed to avert Western intervention in Syria. In any case, it seems most unlikely that Ukraine is "the big one", the event that finally tips us over the edge into a new era of all encompassing geo-political, and therefore financial, instability.
We don't buy the theory that growing American isolationism, or at least choosiness about where it deploys its still considerable military might, has left a void in certain parts of the world into which chaos will now step.
There will be another big sell-off in Western stock markets at some stage over the next year or two, but it won't be caused by Ukraine's attempted divorce from Russia.
No, the forces that determine it will be much closer to home. Top-line growth is becoming ever harder to find at a time when corporate profits are at a near-record share of GDP but wages a near-record low. Equities look cheap only against bonds, which have been inflated to ridiculous levels by abundant central bank money printing. The long march back to more "normal" monetary conditions poses a far bigger threat to the stability of financial markets than developments in Kiev.
For events that truly poleaxes markets, you have to look to Black Swans in major economies - to the near collapse of America's banking system, the virtual implosion of Europe's ridiculous experiment in monetary union and so on. Such events are not sparked by conflicts in faraway places, but are nearly always self-inflicted.
With all of these factors still obvious and looming, Ross Aldridge Las Vegas Nevada does not see this impacting the Stock Markets until the 3rd or 4th quarter of 2014.
Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.