Because no one will really save Ukraine
That in Ukraine is a war of conquest: Putin wants to "Russify" Kiev. Enzo Reale's analysis for Atlantico Quotidiano
On the night of February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine from multiple fronts (northern, southern and eastern). This is a large-scale aggression, aiming directly at the center of political power to produce regime change favorable to Moscow's interests through the use of force. A day that will remain forever in the history of infamy. Putin thus began the much-desired reconquest of the Ukrainian nation, destined in his intentions to create a satellite state totally dependent on the will of the Kremlin. A model similar to the Belarusian one but not identical: unlike the Lukashenko regime, already normalized, in Ukraine Putin aims at the annihilation of the ruling class and of the country's own national identity.
The analyzes of the "experts" have aged very badly, who warned that, after all, Putin's showdown was aimed "only" at keeping Kiev away from NATO and at negotiating "security guarantees" for Moscow. Even 24 hours before the invasion, illustrious realist analysts (sic!) Explained on Italian television screens that Russia has always feared "encirclement" and "invasions from the West", implicitly comparing the Hitlerian attack of 1941 with the enlargement of the Atlantic Alliance in Eastern Europe. Too bad that Hitler is sitting in the rooms of the Kremlin today and that his criminal action takes us back to 1939, when the German dictator invaded Poland, plunging the world into the Second World War.
Yet it was enough to pay attention to last Monday's speech to the nation, in which the Russian president effectively denied the existence of Ukraine as a state entity and promised the extinction of its sovereignty. It is amazing how history has taught us nothing and how we insist on not interpreting the words of despots for what they are, trying to adapt them to the rules of the game in force in democratic societies. While Putin was shelling his Mein Kampf worldwide, once again he preferred to sell the fiction of an alleged diplomatic strategy. But no. An increasingly paranoid leader locked up in his revisionist labyrinth explained his intentions exactly. Only the chronic inability to take into account the nature of regimes, to rely on purely theoretical considerations on the rationality of geopolitical actors, prevented many from understanding this simple reality: Putin was on his way to war because the consolidation of his authoritarian system could no longer regardless.
The military escalation of the last few hours has been predictably added to the verbal one, a classic by now of the incontinent rhetoric of the Kremlin: in his official announcement of the invasion, Putin cited as objectives the "denazification of Ukraine", the end of the "genocide" in the Donbass, evergreen topics of Moscow's anti-Ukrainian propaganda, and threatened the West with "never before seen consequences" in case of "interference". The reference to the possibility of a nuclear attack is all too obvious. The most ominous forecasts on the eve indicated an entry of Russian troops into the Donbass region to consolidate the positions of the rebels following the recognition of the independence of the secessionist republics: in reality the aerial bombings and the penetration on the territory were generalized, from directions opposing and converging, therefore not limited to the East but also coming from the Black Sea area to the south and from Belarus to the north. To stay in the main centers, there have been attacks on Mariupol, Odessa, the capital Kiev, but the anti-aircraft alarm has also gone off in Lviv, almost on the border with Poland. At 8 in the morning the Russian armored vehicles were already at the gates of Karkhiv (North-East, one and a half million inhabitants).
This is not meant to be a war chronicle but at least two aspects must be underlined, in these initial phases. With the large-scale attack, Putin went beyond every imaginable red line until a few days ago, even the one that seemed to have set himself up with the internal staging on the Donbass: as anticipated, the conflict that has raged since 2014 in the East of Country is the bubo that serves Putin as a springboard towards the conquest of Kiev (political or military, as we will see), but in no case the sole objective of his foray. The area was already in fact under Russian control thanks to the separatist militias, and the entry of regular troops responds to an expansion plan to the extended borders of the region, a necessary premise for the split and definitive destabilization of Ukrainian state institutions. Putin wants to implode Ukraine from the inside to redesign its political-ideological structure according to his own schemes. The participation of real Belarusians in the attack, however, adds another important element of evaluation, as it extends the war scenario to a formally sovereign state but de facto already subjected to Moscow. What unequivocally demonstrates that this war is not – as some analysts argue – the consequence of the precipitate of events (who made them precipitate, if not Putin?) But the result of a plan conceived at the table and of a geopolitical scenario that Russia had been preparing for some time.
"Putin probably decided to go to war on Ukraine last July, when he published a long essay on the historical unity of the Russians and Ukrainians – Niall Ferguson observed yesterday in the Spectator – in which he argued speciously that the independence of Ukraine it was a historical anomaly. Which made it perfectly clear that he was considering the invasion of the country ”. The response of the United States and Europe then went in the direction of appeasement: instead of claiming the legitimacy and defense of Ukraine's sovereign aspirations, they hastened to reiterate that its accession to the European Union and NATO was not planned. Despite this, but quite predictably, during the following months Moscow would have used this reassurance to its exclusive advantage, playing the NATO bugbear card in alternating phases, giving a glimpse of a predisposition to negotiation but, in fact, formulating inadmissible requests while accumulating troops to the borders.
The reality is that we have served Putin on a silver platter the chance to calmly organize the assault on Ukraine. When the explicit negative to an armed intervention in defense of Kiev came from Washington, the time signal for the invasion went off in the Kremlin. The road was clear, the West would have been satisfied with the usual dose of low-cost rhetoric and the imposition of economic sanctions that Moscow was already preparing to absorb and which, in any case, would have produced negative consequences even for those who had them. taxes. A plan calculated down to the smallest detail, which risks being successful – at least in the short term – in the absence of a coordinated and compact response from the Western chancelleries. But the sanctions do not stop the tanks and, in the meantime, Kiev may already have fallen. However, that of the former KGB agent remains a risky bet. According to Antonella Scott, of Il Sole 24Ore, "the Russian president is aware of the price he will pay, he may be the winner of the day but this is the beginning of his end". It will certainly be interesting over time to try to understand how the dynamics within the system have pushed Putin to take a decision that inevitably pushes Russia itself into a dead end tunnel, and what weight they will have on the continuation of his presidency.
instead of showing its teeth, the German-led Europe has invited Putin to the table of the energy business, handing him the keys to geopolitical penetration in the continent. In many quarters, Washington is now accused of having sacrificed Ukraine, leaving Europe alone in the face of its fate. It is true that the United States, engaged in confrontation with China, lacked determination to face the Russian threat that was materializing before their eyes. But Europe's destiny of dependence on Moscow is built on its own, and today Angela Merkel's hagiographies can easily fill the garbage bins.
For now it is all a movement of indignation and condemnation, then – rest assured – the distinctions, the relativizations, the false equidistances will start again. Pacifism slumbers, bewildered by an imperialism not attributable to the Yankee eagle. Unaccustomed to critical thinking and forgetting its founding principles, Western civilization is finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish good from evil, finding itself systematically unprepared for events that it has preferred to cancel from its ideal horizon. Nobody will save Ukraine from Russification. Let's just hope that the torture will last as little as possible and prepare for the next wars that Russia will declare in Europe (and for that of the Chinese Communists against Taiwan). Unless something happens around Red Square in the meantime.
(Extract from an article published in Atlantico Quotidiano)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/ucraina-russia-guerra-conquista/ on Sat, 26 Feb 2022 07:34:01 +0000.