After days of uncertainty and escalation of tension, finally, at 3:00 am on February 24, 2022, Russia attacked Ukraine. It was no longer just cyberattacks or disinformation, but now the bombings were beginning – including in Kiev, the capital – and the surface-to-surface missile attacks.
In trying to find explanations for what is happening, one inevitably has to turn one’s eyes towards the Kremlin. And at that point you have to clearly differentiate between excuses and reasons. Moscow’s favorite excuse, already used before in the past, is the protection of the Russian minorities present in Ukraine and that, in the Donetsk and Luhansk territories, thanks also to a deliberate strategy deployed by Russia since 2014 in that sense, they would now actually constitute a majority of the population. However, Russia’s reasons go much further: in the first place, Russia, which claims to want to “denazify” Ukraine, paradoxically seems to perfectly follow a fascist geopolitical manual worthy of Karl Haushofer himself and, in that sense, feels the the need to expand its “living space” and to build a kind of “security glacis” that separates it from the NATO and EU states, which it perceives as rivals.
However, the Russian aspirations would not stop there. Quite the contrary. Vladimir Putin, who has never hidden his desire to recover the Russian splendor of bygone eras, recognized just a couple of days ago what had been obvious for many analysts for decades: his desire to rebuild the Soviet Union. In Russia, therefore, there is a manifest and already openly expressed will to recover all the space that was once theirs.
Still, Russian stocks could well go even further. In this sense, the easternmost states of Europe, such as Poland, the Baltic States or Finland itself, have good reason to feel uneasy about the not insignificant risk of becoming the next targets on the list of Russian aspirations.
Russia imposes its own logic of an imperial model that we believed buried in the memory of centuries
A situation in which it is not surprising that Finland, a traditionally neutral state, has considered asking to join NATO and that both the Atlantic Alliance itself and the United States are reinforcing their military presence in the area, in a move in which It is worth highlighting the sending of naval troops to the Black Sea and F35 planes to Lithuania and Estonia.
Now, while this reality is worrying, it would not be so if it did not respond to a conception of politics completely different from the one that has allowed the functioning of the international order as we know it, not only since the end of the Second World War, but even , since the Peace of Westphalia, to the extent that it implies the manifest rejection by Russia of the basic principle of the sovereign equality of States and the imposition, in its place, of the logic of an imperial model that we believed buried forever in the memory of the centuries and according to which the powers can decide the fate of the smallest political communities. A conception of the political that is not only illiberal in relation to the international order, but also in relation to the internal order, where the autocratic models would be presented, for the sake of their supposed greater efficiency, as superior and preferable to the democratic ones.
The picture is even bleaker if we consider that the Russian Federation is not alone in this bet. Quite the contrary, and as the EU High Commissioner for Foreign Policy, Josep Borrell, explained, the People’s Republic of China shares with Russia the aspiration to a different international order in which global governance based on rules and institutions built since the II World War is replaced by another based on the preferences of the powers and proportional to their weight, influence and capabilities. An order where the criterion for judging whether an action is appropriate is the capacity of the State to carry it out successfully in the international arena and its effectiveness in the domestic arena.
Thus, given the way China has toughened its rhetoric and entrenched its presence in the Pacific and Indian Oceans over the past few years, rumors of Chinese incursions into the South China Sea and Taiwan’s air defense zone emerged on the morning of February 24, coinciding with the Russian offensive on Ukraine.
In a situation like the one described and given the determination shown by the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China in pursuing their aspirations, the attitude of the US and, especially, that of the EU, is not exactly reassuring. It is clear that neither EU sanctions nor threats from President Biden will be enough to stop Vladimir Putin.
Above all other considerations, the leaders of the United States and the European Union must be aware that what is at stake in Ukraine is much more than the future of the Donetsk and Luhansk territories, or even that of all of Ukraine and its population, although these are very important: the outcome will determine the design of the world order for the coming decades and the resolution of the dilemma between autocracy and democracy.
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