The ghost that haunts Europe today It is not the communism that Marx and Engels announced in the Manifesto, but a war like the two that destroyed it in the 20th century, but with fewer trenches and troops because nuclear attacks would replace them. That apocalyptic landscape has begun to be glimpsed from proposals such as that of the president of France and the threatening response of the absolute owner of power in Russia. To the east of Moscow lies an immense cemetery of giants. Russian armies crushed Turkmen khanates and also immense European armies.
More than 700,000 soldiers made up the troops with which Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812. Almost three-quarters of them fell on the battlefields in that military debacle that Tolstoy portrayed in the pages of his monumental War and Peace. “Operation Barbarossa,” an invasion launched by Hitler in 1941, was also defeated. Those victories of Tsar Alexander I and Stalin surrounded the warning with which Vladimir Putin responded to the idea of sending Western troops to Ukraine that he proposed. Emmanuel Macron.
The response of Vladimir Putin He went even further, entering fully into the chilling dimension of the atomic threat. “We have weapons capable of reaching their territories,” said the Russian president, referring to European countries and their American allies. And he spoke of “a real threat of nuclear weapons being used, which means the destruction of civilization.”
The risk of expanding the conflict increases in Kaliningrad, the former German Königsberg annexed by Russia in 1945, which today could be a threat to its neighbor, Lithuania, and by extension to the other two Baltic republics that make up the NATO. The Russian threat to Moldova is also growing, where pro-Russian separatists who control Transnistria, or Transnistria, the territorial strip they want to annex to Russia, have begun to request military protection.
The death of Alexei Navalny in a Siberian prison is an ostentation of criminality. And the author of that crime this week threatened the world, showing himself willing to sacrifice humanity rather than lose the war in Ukraine. Nothing less than that means the “destruction of civilization” he spoke of. The danger of extermination of the human species in an atomic hell has existed since the last decades of the last century, when nuclear arsenals reached dimensions that could wipe out the bulk of animal life on the planet. But it is the first time that the leader of a power with arsenals full of warheads and missiles includes in a threat the possibility of destroying the entire “civilization.”
Putin had already threatened atomic war. It was at the beginning of the conflict when Ukraine, recently invaded, demanded immediate entry into the Atlantic alliance so that the Western powers could intervene directly in the war against Russia, under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, by which if a member state is attacked, the military bloc must take action against the attacking country. Subsequently, when Ukrainian forces advanced to recover territories, Putin and Medvedev spoke of using tactical weapons on the invaded country, that is, attacking with atomic bombs of limited range and destructiveness.
Now he once again exhibited his willingness to wage the war that never happened under the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, which at this point in the arms race would be total assured destruction. It was the response to the letter that Macron was willing to play: sending Western troops to Ukraine. Úrsula Von del Leyen joined the French president’s proposal a little later. The president of the European Commission suggested using Russia’s frozen assets to finance the purchase of weapons and ammunition for Ukraine, as well as hinting that all-out war in Europe could be inevitable.
The proposal and the insinuation he made Von Der Leyen They enhance the possibility suggested by Macron. Although the French president said that “there is no consensus at this moment” to send troops, he added that “no option can be ruled out” because the decision is that “we will do everything necessary so that Russia cannot win this war.” message reads Putin: Europe decided that Russia will not win the war.
While decisive North American aid continues to be blocked in Congress by Republicans who respond to donald trump, the European discourse increasingly makes it clear that, if the New York magnate returns to the White House, Europe will have to reinvent its defense system, abandoning the alliance with the United States. For Brussels, Trump is one of Putin’s strategic assets. What the Trumpist Republicans are doing in Congress is absolutely functional to the head of the Kremlin and is tilting the war in favor of Russia.
Although Russia shows that it lacks muscle to deliver the final blow, the Ukrainian forces retreat due to lack of ammunition. And the possibility that Ukraine will definitively lose the massive support it received from the United States puts Europe before a dramatic decision: without American support, one of the few chances of defeating Russia is to send European troops to Ukraine. That is, the tan feared direct clash between NATO and the Eurasian giant.
That potential confrontation, which could lead to a nuclear war, hovered like a ghost at the beginning of the conflict. With the advance of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, this danger was losing intensity, except for the repeated threats made by the Russian president and the number two on the Russian Security Council, Dmitri Medvediev, to use atomic weapons. In these dramatic months for Ukraine because Trump, blocking military assistance, tilts the conflict in favor of Russia, Europe has begun to raise the possibility of a direct clash. What Europe is implying is that, with or without the United States and with or without NATO letterhead, a military clash between Western powers and Russia is a real possibility.
Image gallery
