What happens in Ukraine. How Russia moves. And how the US and the US react. The point of Gianmarco Volpe, the global desk chief of Agenzia Nova

Russian forces enter Kiev, the fall of Volodymyr Zelensky's government is perhaps a matter of hours. The West observes these developments as one watches a lion pounce on a gazelle in National Geographic, tempted to turn away or perhaps change the channel. And yet he should ask himself some questions, if he cares about having a role in the world that is reconfiguring itself before our eyes.

It is good to clarify one point: the world has always been and always will be full of countries that are determined to use force to change the environment around them . To discourage them, once the path of diplomacy has been exhausted, one can resort to military or economic instruments. If democracies are not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to equip themselves with the former or to take on the latter, then they are doomed to lose any capacity for deterrence. And watching others reshape the world to their liking.

In the years of the Cold War, the world balance was based on one assumption: the United States knew that the Soviet Union was willing to go to war , even to use its nuclear arsenal to defend its interests. The Soviets knew that the Americans were willing to do the same. In every corner of the world.

In modern Western democracies, leaders depend on popular consensus . The more their power is perimeter, the more the horizon of their office is limited, the more they need the support of the electorate. The use of war is no longer salable to voters, either in Europe or in the United States, unless the imminent safety of the population is at stake. Nor is the increase in military spending any more politically sustainable, let alone for a nuclear arsenal.

Then there are the economic sanctions. Those launched in recent days by the United States and the European Union against Russia are certainly not useless. They essentially aim to make the oligarchs who support Putin lose a lot of money and to deprive Moscow of the ability to compete with the West on a technological level. Their effectiveness, however, will necessarily have to be weighed in the long term.

We will likely rediscover it the day those with economic power in Russia decide it is time to get rid of Putin .

Our societies are not willing to lose money to punish the aggression of a sovereign country , 1,600 kilometers away in the case of Italy: Putin knows this and it is with his back covered by this awareness that he announced the invasion of Ukraine . China knows it too, Turkey knows it. All those autocracies that we democrats today can only watch as they redraw the borders of the world know this.

Then we can also be indignant, we can make beautiful souls. But in reality, it is not possible to change the channel.

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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/lucraina-la-russia-e-le-sanzioni/ on Sat, 26 Feb 2022 12:33:48 +0000.