The Russia-Ukraine war as seen by a former NATO
The essay by Jacques Baud, Swiss strategic analyst, Head Small Arms and Light Weapons & Mine Action / Political Affairs and Security Policy Division / Nato (Brussels) from 2013 to 2017
The referendums conducted by the two self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in May 2014 were not “independence” (независимость) referendums, as claimed by some unscrupulous journalists, but referendums of “self-determination” or “autonomy”. The adjective "pro-Russian" suggests that Russia was part of the conflict, but that was not quite the case. The term "Russian speakers" would have been more honest. On the other hand, these referendums were proposed against Vladimir Putin's opinion.
In reality, these republics have not sought to separate from Ukraine, but to acquire a status of autonomy that guarantees them the use of Russian as an official language. In fact, the first legislative act of the new government formed after the overthrow of President Yanukovych was the abolition, on February 23, 2014, of the 2012 Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law which made Russian an official language. This decision caused a storm in the Russian-speaking part of the population. There followed a fierce repression against the Russian-speaking regions (Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Luhansk and Donetsk) since February 2014, which led to a militarization of the context and some massacres (in Odessa and Mariupol, the most important). At the end of the summer of 2014, nothing remains but the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.
In this phase, too rigid and entrenched behind a doctrinary approach to the art of operations, the Ukrainian staffs suffer the enemy without being able to impose themselves. Examination of the conduct of the fighting in 2014-2016 in the Donbass shows that the Ukrainian general staff systematically and mechanically applied the same operational schemes. However, the war waged by the autonomists closely resembles what we observe in the Sahel: highly mobile operations carried out with light vehicles. With a more flexible and less doctrinal approach, the rebels were able to exploit the inertia of Ukrainian forces to "trap" them repeatedly.
The rebels are armed thanks to the defections of the Russian-speaking Ukrainian units that pass over to the side of the rebels. As Ukrainian failures progress, tank, artillery or anti-aircraft battalions increase the ranks of the autonomists. This is what pushes the Ukrainians to commit themselves to the Minsk agreements.
But, immediately after signing the Minsk 1 agreements, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko launches a vast counter-terrorism operation (ATO / Антитерористична операція) against the Donbass. Bis repetita placent: badly advised by NATO officials, the Ukrainians suffer a crushing defeat in Debaltsevo which forces them to commit to the Minsk 2 Accords.
It is essential to remember here that the Minsk 1 (September 2014) and Minsk 2 (February 2015) agreements did not envisage either the separation or the independence of the republics, but their autonomy within the framework of Ukraine. In these agreements it is explicitly written that the status of the republics had to be negotiated between Kiev and the representatives of the republics, for an internal solution to Ukraine.
That is why since 2014, Russia has systematically demanded their application by refusing to be a party to the negotiations, because it was an internal issue within Ukraine. On the other hand, the West – led by France – has rigorously tried to replace the Minsk agreements with the "Normandy format", which brought Russians and Ukrainians face to face. However, let us remember that there were never Russian troops in the Donbass before February 23-24, 2022. On the other hand, not even OSCE observers have ever observed the slightest trace of Russian units operating in the Donbass. Likewise, the US intelligence map released by the Washington Post on December 3, 2021 shows no Russian troops in the Donbass.
In October 2015, Vasyl Hrytsak, director of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), confessed that only 56 Russian fighters had been observed in the Donbass. The Ukrainian army was then in a deplorable state. In October 2018, after four years of war, the head of the Ukrainian Military Prosecutor Anatoly Matios declared that Ukraine had lost 2,700 men in the Donbass: 891 to diseases, 318 to road accidents, 177 to other accidents, 175 to poisoning (alcohol , drugs), 172 for reckless handling of weapons, 101 for violations of safety rules, 228 for murder and 615 suicides.
Indeed, the army is undermined by the corruption of its cadres and no longer enjoys the support of the population. According to a report by the UK Home Office, on the occasion of the recall of the reservists in March-April 2014, 70% did not show up for the first session, 80% for the second, 90% for the third and 95% for the fourth. In October / November 2017, 70% of conscripts did not show up for the “Autumn 2017” recall campaign. Not to mention the suicides and desertions (these often for the benefit of the autonomists) which reach up to 30% of the forces in the so-called Anti-Terrorist Operation area. Young Ukrainians refuse to go to fight in the Donbass and prefer emigration, which also explains, at least partially, the country's demographic deficit.
The Ukrainian defense ministry then turns to NATO for help in making its armed forces more "attractive". But this takes a very long time and for this reason the Ukrainian government has resorted to paramilitary militias to compensate for the lack of soldiers. They are mostly made up of foreign mercenaries, often far-right activists. In 2020, they made up about 40 percent of Ukrainian forces and numbered around 102,000 men, according to Reuters . They are armed, financed and trained by the United States, Great Britain, Canada and France. More than 19 nationalities are represented, including Swiss.
Western countries therefore clearly created and supported the Ukrainian far-right militias. In October 2021, the Jerusalem Post raised the alarm by denouncing the Centuria project. These militias have been operating in Donbass since 2014, with Western support. Although the term "Nazi" can be debated, the fact remains that these militias are violent, spread a nauseating ideology and are virulently anti-Semitic. Their anti-Semitism is more cultural than political, which is why the term "Nazi" is not really appropriate. Their hatred of the Jew stems from the great famines of the 1920s and 1930s in Ukraine, resulting from Stalin's confiscation of crops to finance the modernization of the Red Army. However, this genocide – known in Ukraine as the Holodomor – was perpetrated by the NKVD (ancestor of the KGB), whose upper management levels were composed mainly of Jews. That is why, today, Ukrainian extremists are asking Israel to apologize for the crimes of communism, as the Jerusalem Post notes. We are therefore far from a "rewriting of history" by Vladimir Putin.
These militias, born from the far-right groups that animated the Euromaidan revolution in 2014, are made up of fanatical and brutal individuals. The best known of these is the Azov regiment, whose emblem resembles that of the 2nd Panzer SS Das Reich Division, which is the object of true veneration in Ukraine for liberating Kharkov from the Soviets in 1943, before perpetrating the Oradour massacre in France. sur-Glane in 1944.
Among the famous figures of the Azov regiment was the opponent Roman Protassevitch, arrested in 2021 by the Belarusian authorities following the case of the RyanAir flight FR4978. The reference is to the intentional hijacking of an airliner by a MiG-29 on May 23, 2021 – with Putin's agreement, of course – to arrest Protassevitch, although the information now available in no way confirms this scenario.
Protassevitch a "journalist" in love with democracy. Indeed, a rather illuminating survey produced by an American NGO in 2020 highlighted Protassevitch's far-right militant activities. The Western conspiracy then sets in motion and unscrupulous media "clean up" his biography. Finally, in January 2022, the ICAO report was published proving that, despite some procedural errors, Belarus acted in accordance with the rules in force and that the MiG-29 took off 15 minutes after the RyanAir pilot had decided to land in Minsk. So no Belarusian conspiracy, much less complicity with Putin. Another detail: Protassevitch, cruelly tortured by the Belarusian police, is now free.
The qualification of "Nazi" or "neo-Nazi" given to Ukrainian paramilitaries is considered Russian propaganda. Maybe, but that's not the opinion of the Times of Israel , the Simon Wiesenthal Center, or the West Point Academy Counterterrorism Center. That said, we can talk about them because, in 2014, Newsweek magazine seemed to instead associate them with… Islamic State. Therefore, the West supports and continues to arm the militias that have been guilty of many crimes against civilian populations since 2014: rape, torture and massacre. While the Swiss government has been very quick to take sanctions against Russia, it has not adopted any against Ukraine, which has slaughtered its own population since 2014. Indeed, those who fight to defend human rights in Ukraine have long condemned time the actions of these groups, but was not followed by our governments. This is because, in reality, we are not trying to help Ukraine, but rather to fight Russia.
The integration of these paramilitary forces into the National Guard has in no way been accompanied by a "denazification", as some would claim. Among many examples, the insignia of the Azov Regiment is edifying.
Very schematically, in 2022, the Ukrainian armed forces fighting the Russian offensive are divided into:
– Army, under the control of the Ministry of Defense: it is divided into 3 corps and made up of maneuvering formations (tanks, heavy artillery, missiles, etc.).
– National Guard, which depends on the Ministry of the Interior and is divided into 5 territorial commands.
The National Guard is therefore a territorial defense force that is not part of the Ukrainian army. It includes paramilitary militias, called "volunteer battalions" (добровольчі батальйоні), also known by the evocative name of "retaliatory battalions", consisting of infantry. Primarily trained for urban combat, they now defend cities like Kharkov, Mariupol, Odessa, Kiev, etc.
Most services are no longer able to understand the military situation in Ukraine. The self-proclaimed "experts" who parade on our screens tirelessly broadcast the same information modulated by the claim that Russia – and Vladimir Putin – are irrational. Let's take a step back.
Since November 2021, Americans have not stopped denouncing the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yet the Ukrainians do not seem to agree. For what reason?
We have to go back to March 24, 2021. On that day, Volodymyr Zelensky issued a decree for the reconquest of Crimea and began to deploy his forces in the south of the country. Simultaneously, several NATO exercises are taking place between the Black and Baltic Seas, accompanied by a significant increase in reconnaissance flights along the Russian border. Russia then conducted some exercises, in order to verify the operational readiness of its troops and to demonstrate that it was following the evolution of the situation.
The waters calmed down until October-November, with the end of the ZAPAD 21 exercises, whose troop movements are interpreted as a reinforcement in view of an offensive against Ukraine. Yet even the Ukrainian authorities refute the idea of Russian preparations for war and Oleksiy Reznikov, Ukrainian defense minister, says there has been no change at the border since spring.
In violation of the Minsk agreements, Ukraine conducts aerial operations in the Donbass using drones, with which it carries out at least one attack on a fuel depot in Donetsk in October 2021. The American press notes this, but not the European one, and no one. condemns these raids.
In February 2022, events precipitate. On February 7, during his visit to Moscow, Emmanuel Macron reiterated his attachment to the Minsk agreements to Vladimir Putin, a commitment he would repeat at the end of his meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky the following day. But on 11 February, in Berlin, after 9 hours of work, the meeting of the political advisers of the leaders of the "Normandy Format" ends without a concrete result: the Ukrainians still refuse to implement the Minsk agreements, apparently under pressure of the United States. Vladimir Putin then notes that Macron has made him vain promises, and that the West is not ready to enforce the agreements, as indeed it has been for eight years.
Ukrainian preparations in the contact area continue. The Russian parliament is alarmed and on February 15 asks Vladimir Putin to recognize the independence of the republics, which he refuses to do.
On February 17, President Joe Biden announced that Russia would attack Ukraine in the following days. How do you know? Since February 16, artillery bombardments on the Donbass populations have dramatically increased, as evidenced by daily reports from OSCE observers. Of course, neither the media, nor the European Union, nor NATO, nor any Western government reacts or intervenes. It will be said later that this is Russian misinformation. In fact, it appears that the European Union and some countries have deliberately ignored the massacre of the people of Donbass, knowing that this would provoke Russian intervention.
At the same time, there are reports of sabotage in the Donbass. On January 18, Donbass fighters intercepted saboteurs equipped with Western-speaking equipment who spoke Polish among themselves and tried to cause chemical incidents in Gorlivka. They could be CIA mercenaries made up of Ukrainian or European fighters, led or "advised" by the Americans to carry out sabotage actions in the Donbass Republics.
Indeed, Joe Biden has already known since February 16 that the Ukrainians have started bombing the civilian populations of the Donbass, putting Vladimir Putin in front of a difficult choice: to militarily help the Donbass, and create an international problem, or to stand by and watch the Russian speakers. Donbass get crushed.
If he decides to intervene, Vladimir Putin can invoke the international obligation of "Responsibility To Protect" (R2P). But he knows that whatever its nature or extent, the intervention will trigger a shower of sanctions. Therefore, whether his intervention is confined to the Donbass or goes further to put pressure on Westerners over Ukraine's status, the price will be the same. This is what he explains in his February 21 speech.
That day, he accepts the Duma's request and recognizes the independence of the two republics of Donbass and, soon after, he signs friendship and assistance treaties with them.
The bombing of Ukrainian artillery on the people of Donbass continues and on 23 February the two republics ask for Russian military help. On the 24th, Vladimir Putin invokes article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which provides for military assistance in the framework of a defensive alliance.
In order to make the Russian intervention totally illegal in the public eye, the fact that the war actually started on February 16 is deliberately hidden. The Ukrainian army was preparing to attack the Donbass as early as 2021, as some Russian and European intelligence services knew well … In his February 24 speech, Vladimir Putin set out the two objectives of his operation: "demilitarize" and "de -nazify ”Ukraine. It is therefore not a question of taking over Ukraine, or even occupying it, and certainly not destroying it.
As of that time, visibility into the development of the operation is limited: the Russians have an excellent ability to keep operations secret (OPSEC process) and the details of their planning are not known. Of course, quite quickly, the carrying out of operations allows us to understand how the strategic objectives have been translated into the operational level.
– Demilitarization:
. ground destruction of Ukrainian aviation, air defense systems and reconnaissance assets;
. neutralization of command and intelligence structures (C3I), as well as of the main logistic routes in the depth of the territory;
. encirclement of most of the Ukrainian army massed in the south-east of the country.
– Denazification:
. destruction or neutralization of volunteer battalions operating in the cities of Odessa, Kharkov and Mariupol, as well as in other locations on the territory.
The Russian offensive is taking place in a very "classic" way. First – as the Israelis had done in 1967 – with the ground destruction of aviation in the very first hours. Then, we witness a simultaneous progression on several axes, according to the principle of "flowing water": we advance wherever the resistance is weak and we leave the cities for a second moment. To the north, the Chernobyl power plant is occupied immediately to prevent sabotage. Pictures of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers jointly monitoring the plant are not shown, of course.
The idea that Russia is trying to take over Kiev, the capital, to eliminate Zelensky, typically comes from Westerners: this is what they did in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and what they wanted to do in Syria with the help of the Islamic state. But Vladimir Putin never intended to eliminate or overthrow Zelensky. On the contrary, Russia tries to keep him in power by pushing him to negotiate with the siege of Kiev. He who had refused to do so until now to implement the Minsk agreements, but now the Russians want to achieve the neutrality of Ukraine.
Many Western commentators were surprised that the Russians continued to seek a negotiated solution while conducting military operations. The explanation is in Russian strategic philosophy, since Soviet times. For Westerners, war begins when politics stops. However, the Russian approach follows a Clausewitzian inspiration: war is the continuity of politics and one can pass smoothly from one to the other, even in the course of fighting. This creates pressure on the opponent and prompts him to negotiate.
From an operational point of view, the Russian offensive was exemplary: in six days, the Russians conquered a territory as large as the United Kingdom, with a speed of advance greater than that which the Wehrmacht had reached in 1940.
Most of the Ukrainian army was deployed in the south of the country for a major operation against the Donbass. That is why Russian forces were able to surround it in early March in the "cauldron" between Slavyansk, Kramatorsk and Severodonetsk, with one push from the east through Kharkov and another from the south from Crimea. The troops of the republics of Donetsk (DPR) and the republics of Luhansk (LPR) completed the action of the Russian forces with a push from the east.
At this point, the Russian forces are slowly tightening their grip, but they are no longer under the pressure of time. Their demilitarization goal is almost achieved and the remaining Ukrainian forces no longer have an operational and strategic command structure.
As for the Donbass republics, they have "liberated" their territories and are fighting in the city of Mariupol.
In cities like Kharkov, Mariupol and Odessa, defense is ensured by paramilitary militias. They know that the goal of "denazification" is primarily aimed at them.
For an urban attacker, civilians are a problem. This is why Russia is trying to create humanitarian corridors to empty cities of civilians and leave militias alone in order to fight them more easily.
On the contrary, these militias try to keep civilians in the cities to dissuade the Russian army from coming to fight there. That is why they are reluctant to implement these corridors and go to great lengths to ensure that Russian efforts are in vain: they can thus use the civilian population as "human shields". Of course, the videos showing civilians trying to leave Mariupol and being beaten by fighters from the Azov regiment are thoroughly censored by us.
On Facebook, the Azov group was classified in the same category as the Islamic State and subject to the platform's "policy on dangerous individuals and organizations". It was therefore forbidden to glorify him and the "posts" that were favorable to him were systematically banned. But on February 24, Facebook changed its policy and allowed pro-militia posts. Likewise, in March, the platform authorized an appeal for the murder of Russian soldiers and leaders in former Eastern European countries. This is in regards to the values that inspire our leaders, as we will see below.
Our media spread a romantic image of popular resistance. It is this image that has led the European Union to finance the distribution of weapons to the civilian population. It is, in truth, a criminal act.
These command structures are the essence of armies: their function is to channel the use of force into an objective. By arming citizens in a disorderly way, as is currently the case, the EU transforms them into fighters, and therefore also into potential targets. Moreover, without command, without operational purposes, the distribution of weapons inevitably leads to settling of scores, banditry and actions that are more lethal than effective. War becomes a matter of emotions. Force becomes violence. This is exactly what happened in Tawarga (Libya) from 11 to 13 August 2011, where 30,000 black Africans were massacred with parachuted weapons (illegally) from France. On the other hand, even the British Royal Institute for Strategic Studies (RUSI) does not see any added value in these arms deliveries.
Furthermore, when you hand over weapons to a country at war, you expose yourself to the risk of being considered belligerent. The Russian attacks of March 13, 2022 on Mykolaiv Air Base follow their warning that arms shipments would be treated as hostile targets.
The EU repeats the disastrous experience of the Third Reich in the last hours of the battle of Berlin. The war must be left to the military, and when one side has lost, it must be admitted. And if there is to be resistance, it must necessarily be guided and structured. Instead, we are doing exactly the opposite: citizens are being pushed to fight and, at the same time, Facebook is allowing calls for the murder of Russian soldiers and leaders. This applies to the values that inspire us.
In some intelligence services, this irresponsible decision is seen as a way to use the Ukrainian population as slaughter fodder to fight Vladimir Putin's Russia. This kind of murderous decision was to be left to the colleagues of Ursula von der Leyen's grandfather. It would have been wiser to enter into negotiations and thus obtain guarantees for the civilian population, rather than adding fuel to the fire. It is easy to be combative with the blood of others …
It is important to make it clear at the outset that it is not the Ukrainian army that defends Mariupol, but the Azov militia, which is made up of foreign mercenaries.
In its summary of the situation of March 7, 2022, the Russian mission of the United Nations in New York states that "residents report that the Ukrainian armed forces have evacuated personnel from the maternity ward of the Mariupol city hospital and set up a post of shooting inside the structure ".
On March 8, the independent Russian media Lenta.ru published testimony from civilians in Mariupol who claimed that the maternity ward had been taken over by the Azov regimental militias who had driven out the civilian occupiers, threatening them with weapons. They thus confirm the statements of the Russian ambassador a few hours earlier.
Mariupol hospital occupies a dominant position. For this it is perfectly suited for the placement of anti-tank weapons and observation. On March 9, Russian forces hit the building. According to CNN , there are 17 injured, but the footage shows no victims in those environments and nothing proves that the victims mentioned are connected to this attack. We are talking about children, but in reality we do not see anything. It may be true, but it may be false… This does not prevent EU leaders from seeing it as a war crime… This allows Zelensky to invoke a no-fly zone over Ukraine soon after.
In fact, it is not known exactly what happened. But the sequence of events tends to confirm that Russian forces hit a position in the Azov regiment and that the maternity ward was therefore free of civilians.
The problem is that the paramilitary militias that ensure the defense of the cities are encouraged by the international community not to respect the customs of war. It seems that the Ukrainians have reproduced the episode of the maternity ward in Kuwait City in 1990, which had been entirely fabricated and staged by the company Hill & Knowlton for a fee of 10.7 million dollars in order to convince the Council of United Nations security to intervene in Iraq for Operation Desert Shield / Storm.
Furthermore, Western politicians have accepted attacks on civilians in Donbass for eight years, without adopting any sanctions against the Ukrainian government. We have long since entered a dynamic in which Western politicians have agreed to sacrifice international law to their goal of weakening Russia.
According to Baud, it appears that throughout the Western world, services have been overwhelmed by politics. The problem is that politicians decide: the best intelligence service in the world is useless if the decision maker doesn't listen to it. This is what happened during this crisis.
However, while some intelligence services had a very accurate and rational picture of the situation, others clearly had the same image as that propagated by our media. In this crisis, the services of the countries of the "new Europe" have played an important role. Secondly, it appears that in some European countries, politicians have deliberately ignored their services in order to respond ideologically to the situation. That is why this crisis was irrational from the start. It will be noted that all the documents that were made public during this crisis were presented by politicians on the basis of commercial information sources.
Some Western politicians, of course, wanted there to be a conflict. In the United States, the attack scenarios presented by Anthony Blinken to the Security Council were only the figment of the imagination of a Tiger Team working for him: he did exactly like Donald Rumsfeld in 2002, who in these ways had "bypassed" the CIA and other much less sensitive intelligence services on Iraqi chemical weapons.
The dramatic developments we are witnessing today have causes that we were familiar with but refused to see:
– at a strategic level, the expansion of NATO (which we have not dealt with here);
– on the political level, the Western refusal to implement the Minsk Agreements;
– and on an operational level, the continuous and repeated attacks on the civilian populations of the Donbass in recent years, and their dramatic increase at the end of February 2022.
In other words, we can of course deplore and condemn the Russian attack. But we (ie the United States, France and the European Union in the lead) have created the conditions for the outbreak of a conflict. We show compassion for the Ukrainian people and for the two million refugees. Alright then. But if we had had a modicum of compassion for the same number of refugees from the Ukrainian people of Donbass slaughtered by their own government, who fled to Russia within eight years, none of this probably would have happened.
Whether it is correct to apply the term "genocide" to the abuses suffered by the people of Donbass is an open question. This term is generally reserved for larger cases (Holocaust, etc.), but the definition in the Genocide Convention is probably broad enough to apply. Jurists will appreciate it.
Clearly, this conflict has led us to hysteria. Sanctions appear to have become the preferred tool of our foreign policy. If we had insisted that Ukraine abide by the Minsk agreements, which we had negotiated and approved, this would not have happened. Vladimir Putin's condemnation is also ours. There is no point in whining after the facts, you had to act first. However, neither Emmanuel Macron (as a guarantor and as a member of the UN Security Council), nor Olaf Scholz, nor Volodymyr Zelensky have fulfilled their commitments. Ultimately, the real defeat is that of those who have no voice.
The European Union was unable to promote the implementation of the Minsk Agreements. On the contrary, it did not react when Ukraine bombed its own population in the Donbass. Had he done so, Vladimir Putin would not have needed to react. Assente dalla fase diplomatica, l'Ue si è distinta per aver alimentato il conflitto. Il 27 febbraio il governo ucraino ha accettato di avviare i negoziati con la Russia. Ma poche ore dopo, l'Unione europea ha votato un finanziamento di 450 milioni di euro per fornire armi all'Ucraina, aggiungendo benzina sul fuoco. A partire da quel momento, gli ucraini sentono che non avranno bisogno di raggiungere un accordo. La resistenza delle milizie Azov a Mariupol provocherà persino un ulteriore finanziamento di 500 milioni di euro per le armi.
In Ucraina, con la benedizione dei paesi occidentali, chi è a favore di una negoziazione viene eliminato. È il caso di Denis Kireyev, uno dei negoziatori ucraini, assassinato il 5 marzo dai servizi segreti ucraini (SBU) perché troppo favorevole ad un accordo con la Russia: viene ucciso dalla milizia Mirotvorets (“Peacemaker”). Questa milizia è associata al sito web Mirotvorets che elenca i “nemici dell'Ucraina”, con i loro dati personali, indirizzo e numeri di telefono, in modo che possano essere molestati o addirittura eliminati; una pratica punibile in molti paesi, ma non in Ucraina. L'Onu e alcuni paesi europei ne hanno chiesto la chiusura… Che però è stata rifiutata dalla Rada.
Alla fine, il prezzo sarà alto, ma Vladimir Putin probabilmente raggiungerà gli obiettivi che si era prefissato. I suoi legami con Pechino si sono consolidati. La Cina sta emergendo come mediatore del conflitto, mentre la Svizzera entra nella lista dei nemici della Russia. Gli americani devono chiedere a Venezuela e Iran il petrolio per uscire dall'impasse energetica in cui si sono cacciati: Juan Guaido sta lasciando la scena per sempre, e gli Stati Uniti devono ritornare vergognosamente sulle sanzioni imposte ai loro nemici.
I ministri occidentali che cercano di far collassare l'economia russa e che assicurano che il popolo russo soffra, o addirittura chieda l'assassinio di Putin, mostrano (anche se hanno parzialmente invertito la forma delle loro osservazioni, ma non sulla sostanza!) che i nostri leader non sono migliori di quelli che odiamo. Perché punire gli atleti paraolimpici russi o gli artisti russi non ha assolutamente nulla a che fare con una lotta contro Putin.
La lezione che traiamo da questo conflitto è sul nostro senso di umanità a geometria variabile. Se eravamo così appassionati di pace e così affezionati all'Ucraina, perché non l'abbiamo incoraggiata di più a rispettare gli accordi che aveva firmato, quelli che anche i membri del Consiglio di Sicurezza avevano approvato?
L'integrità dei media si misura dalla loro volontà di lavorare secondo i termini della Carta di Monaco. Erano riusciti a diffondere l'odio per i cinesi durante la crisi del Covid ei loro messaggi polarizzati portano agli stessi effetti contro i russi. Il giornalismo si sta sempre più spogliando della professionalità per diventare attivista e militante…
Come disse Goethe, “Maggiore è la luce, più scura è l'ombra”. Più sproporzionate sono le sanzioni contro la Russia, più numerosi sono i casi in cui non abbiamo fatti che evidenziano il nostro razzismo e il nostro servilismo. Perché nessun politico occidentale ha reagito agli attacchi contro la popolazione civile del Donbass per otto anni?
Perché alla fine, cosa rende il conflitto in Ucraina più criticabile della guerra in Iraq, Afghanistan o Libia? Quali sanzioni abbiamo adottato contro coloro che hanno deliberatamente mentito davanti alla comunità internazionale per condurre guerre ingiuste, ingiustificate, ingiustificabili e omicide? Abbiamo cercato di “colpire” il popolo americano che ci ha mentito (perché è una democrazia!) prima della guerra in Iraq? Abbiamo adottato una sola sanzione contro i paesi, le aziende oi politici che stanno armando il conflitto in Yemen, considerato la “peggiore catastrofe umanitaria del mondo”? Abbiamo punito i paesi dell'Unione europea che praticano la tortura più abietta sul loro territorio a beneficio degli Stati Uniti?
Porre la domanda significa darci la risposta… E la risposta non è gloriosa.
(Traduzione di un testo in francese a cura di Giuseppe Gagliano)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/la-guerra-russia-ucraina-vista-da-un-ex-nato/ on Sun, 20 Mar 2022 07:14:33 +0000.