What do Russia and the US think of Ukraine
On the Ukrainian affair it is necessary to consider the points of view of five actors: Russia, USA and Great Britain, France and Germany. Guido Salerno Aletta's analysis for MF-Milano Finanza
On the Ukrainian affair, it is necessary to consider the points of view of five actors, who act alone or conserve: Russia, USA and Great Britain, France and Germany.
Moscow's point of view, which is evidently not shared, is of absolute simplicity: considering the dissolution of the USSR the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century, it considers it inadmissible that Ukraine should be admitted to NATO.
The "indivisibility of security" requires that the extension of a military cooperation area must not affect the sphere of others: and instead, any missile weapons in Ukraine would threaten the city of Moscow.
On the other hand, the accession to NATO of the countries that were part of the USSR's zone of influence at the time of the Iron Curtain would have contradicted the principle of freezing the dislocation of American troops and nuclear weapons that had been formalized in the Treaty on the Final settlement of Germany, concluded in 1990 between the Occupying Powers and the Governments of the FRG and the GDR.
In Article 5 (3) it was in fact specified that, following the complete withdrawal of the Soviet armed troops from the territories of the GDR and Berlin, "foreign armed troops, nuclear weapons and their launchers may not be stationed or deployed".
The government of Ukraine has set three "red lines": the intangibility of borders recognized under international law, which entails the recovery of sovereignty over Crimea; the denial of direct negotiations with the two South-Eastern Russian-speaking republics that declared independent in 2014, Donetsk and Luhansk; foreign non-interference in one's own internal affairs. Ukraine's accession to NATO would represent a declaration of war against Russia that "no one would win": Vladimir Putin, pronouncing these words at the end of his meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, froze everyone.
The position of the USA and Great Britain, both insular and maritime powers, responds to a common geopolitical vision in which Ukraine is just a piece of the mosaic: they must be interrupted at any cost, as in the times of the cold war against the USSR but by moving the Iron Curtain to the east, those relations of interdependence, collaboration and development that are allowed by the continuity of that boundless area that goes from Europe to Russia, to China, passing through the Balkans.
It is therefore here that the new frontier must be built, an area of resistance between Russia and the European Union itself, exploiting the memories of the peoples who first suffered from the Soviet invasions and then fought against the centralism of Moscow after the division of Europe decided in Yalta: from Finland to the Baltic Republics, from Hungary to Poland, up to Ukraine which became independent from Russia, but which suffers from not being integrated into either the EU or NATO. It has neither the political, economic, social and market advantages of belonging to the former, nor the military ones guaranteed by the latter.
The recent construction of the direct energy corridors from Russia to Germany and Turkey, which feeds the whole of Europe, has eliminated the leverage that Kiev had benefited from for decades, often abusing it.
For the United States and Great Britain, therefore, neither the ambitious prospect of a Europe that rivals the United States and China on an equal footing, nor its interdependence with Russia, which is rich in energy resources and with China, which is rich in energy resources, are not sustainable. it is both a factory and a consumer market in full development.
The concerns for Ukraine, the aired fears of a Russian invasion, contribute to creating a Slavic-Balkan area which on the one hand is more dependent on the US in terms of defense and which on the other hand develops increasingly more interests. eccentric compared to those of the Eurozone, as has been the case for some time with the Visegrad Group. In the Balkan area, pressures of all kinds persist: from Germany to Russia, from Turkey to China, with the US acting by interdiction.
France and Germany have different roles.
After Brexit, Paris remained the only European nuclear power, and the only one to sit on the UN Security Council; Berlin has the construction of the North Stream and its doubling on its conscience, initiatives that have destabilized and impoverished Ukraine. Both are involved in the Minsk Accords, via the Normandy format, along with Russia and Ukraine itself. The ambition of French President Emmanuel Macron seems to be to become autonomous from American strategies and from NATO itself, trying to build directly with Russia new tools and relations that ensure an area of security and stability in Europe: with this, it also recovers land in the axis with Germany.
The German position, at the end of Angela Merkel's Long Chancellorship, is marked by a pragmatic realism: the construction of a new Iron Curtain, which crosses it, would make Germany lose that secular role, before a buttress erected to stop Soviet Communism after the revolution of 1017, and then that of aggregator of Eastern countries within the EU after the fall of the Berlin Wall, from which it benefited.
For the US, Russia continues to be the enemy of all time for not being able to penetrate it economically, much less to reduce its strategic nuclear potential as it had taken for granted with the collapse of the USSR.
Energy dependence on Russia and increasingly intense relations with China, which is now the US's global competitor, have undermined Germany's geopolitical function in the last decade, which until then was fully consistent with the Anglo-Saxon strategy.
Closing the spaces in the Balkans and undermining relations with Russia, a new Iron Curtain to the east would be unsustainable: hence the glaring backtrack made by the new Chancellor Olaf Scholtz on a visit to Washington, whose outcome he said he was fully aligned with the extreme American toughness towards Russia. Making the best of a bad situation, or perhaps only momentarily bowing to the current flood, Berlin undertakes to support Ukraine economically, to share the US strategy and to build a wall against Moscow if it invades Ukraine "again", paying all costs.
(Extract from an article published on Mf-Milano Finanza; here the full version )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/ucraina-cosa-pensano-russia-stati-uniti/ on Sat, 26 Feb 2022 07:05:16 +0000.