Ukraine, a decisive week

The magazine ‘The Atlantic’ headlined yesterday: only Putin knows how the Russian-Ukrainian conflict will evolve. This may be the decisive week, in which the US has agreed to respond in writing to Russia’s demands, after a positive meeting in Geneva last Friday. It is clear that Westerners cannot agree to Vladimir Putin’s demands to rewrite history and abandon Eastern countries to their fate. But in the White House the “pigeons” rule, the side willing to find a peaceful solution in which the two parties would save face. There would be no winners, and the conflict would slow down long enough to cool it down. One possible solution, proposed by Harvard professor Stephen Walt, would be for Ukraine to be the one to declare that it does not want Russian protection and does not want NATO membership. In other words, it would evolve towards “Finlandization”, in exchange for respecting its territorial integrity and substantive economic aid from the West. Russia would continue to influence the bordering provinces, but it would withdraw its troops from the border and the Crimean dispute would cease to have international importance.

Spain has decided to play its tricks in this crisis. Minister José Manuel Albares was last Tuesday with Anthony Blinken, US Secretary of State, on a lightning trip to Washington and offered him collaboration in everything to deal with the Ukrainian crisis. Compared to other countries that are true military powers, Spain’s contribution will be rather modest, except for the eventual use of the joint bases of Rota and Morón. But gestures count and Pedro Sánchez has launched an operation based on taking advantage of the conflict to improve relations with the US. There is a risk that the reaction of Podemos and the surrounding area will be increasingly pro-Putin and that the lack of seriousness and reliability of the coalition government will become clear on the international scene.

From a European point of view, the Union once again demonstrates its inability to manage geopolitical challenges, even in its neighbourhood. France is in electoral mode and Macron has already intervened to achieve an EU-Russia pact without Washington, something that from a realistic perspective weakens all of Europe. Germany suffers the consequences of having a pacifist population and a huge dependence on Russian gas. Italy is the country close to Russia, due to its economic interests, and it has enough to manage the uncertainty that may come with the succession of Mario Draghi. The countries of Central and Eastern Europe are increasingly pro-USA, the only guarantor of their sovereignty, and are moving away from pro-European theses to move towards common security and defense. As with the Afghanistan fiasco, the current crisis is a knock on the European conscience. No one knows how many more it will take for us Europeans to react.