The head of the Kremlin seems ready for expansionist movements that seem inspired by the Third Reich: the Anschluss and the invasion of Poland. In 1938, Hitler produced the warless annexation of Austria, known as the Anschluss (union). And a year later the invasion of Poland was carried out, which began with Dansig, with a Germanic population.
Vladimir Putin could achieve an annexation by absorption of Belarus, like the one that in 1938 turned Austria into the “Ostmark” “Mark of the East”. He would not even find in Aleksandr Lukashenko the resistance that Hitler encountered in Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg.
In contrast, the invasion of Ukraine will resemble that of Poland in 1939, although it will not take anyone by surprise, like the “blitzkrieg” launched by Germany. The Russian-speaking enclaves of Donestk and Lugansk will be the Ukrainian Dansig where the invasion of Russia would begin. In reality, that invasion has already begun because, although the Russian troops have not yet crossed the border, the warning that Putin gave to Volodymyr Zelensky cuts off his territory.
The Russian president warned his Ukrainian counterpart that if the Ukrainian army enters Donestk and Lugansk, the more than 150,000 Russian soldiers accumulated on the border will enter with their armored divisions and go into direct combat. That warning, in itself, accompanied by the huge accumulation of troops and armor so few kilometers from the secessionist territories, implies a Russian occupation that pushes the border towards the West, closer to Kiev.
The threats of economic sanctions cackled by Western powers, including the significant announcement by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to shut down the Nord Stream 2 project, a huge pipeline that will bring Russian natural gas to Germany, can no longer bring Ukraine’s geography back to the time before the Kremlin’s warning. Since the threat of launching the Russian army on the Ukrainian in the Donbass region, Kiev has its sovereignty restricted in that part of the territory.
Putin hardly does not comply with what was announced in case Zelensky challenges him by sending the army to regain control of the separatist territories.
As long as everything remains as it is, the winner is Putin. But the Kremlin remains fearful that NATO will incorporate Ukraine. Because of this possibility, perhaps the Russian president’s plan is to invade, even if the Ukrainian army does not advance on the separatist enclaves. And if that’s the plan, it could include an agreement with Xi Jinping so that, if China has decided to invade Taiwan, it will do so on the same days that Russia invades Ukraine.
The simultaneity of military actions of such magnitude would overwhelm the powers of the West. It is difficult to rule out that the leaders of Russia and China have spoken about the possibility of synchronizing the invasions that they respectively yearn for.
In the case of Ukraine, the ongoing escalation not only haunts the ghost of the Anschluss and Dansig. Also the ghost of the “Missile Crisis” has begun to roam Eastern Europe.
In the electrifying October 1962, the world was in the shadow of a nuclear threat and, almost sixty years later, the danger suggests repeating itself. This time, the epicenter is not in the Caribbean, but in Ukraine. If the Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Ryabkov, said what he told the official RIA Novosti agency, it is because the Kremlin is announcing to the White House that it will respond to a deployment of medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe by deploying the nuclear arsenal. of Russia, already a Western atomic attack will respond with an atomic attack against the West.
The escalation of ’62 had begun when the United States detected Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. John Kennedy, Nikita Khrushhev and Fidel Castro walked the ledge of a holocaust. Hell would have arisen if that Kremlin chief had accepted the Cuban leader’s recommendation to launch a nuclear attack against the United States if the Western power attacked the island, and if Washington had responded with a conventional bombardment or an invasion to the demolition by the Soviet antiaircraft artillery of a Lockheed U-2 that carried out low flights over Cuba.
Khrushev did not accept Castro’s suggestion, nor did Kennedy respond with an attack on Cuba by shooting down his spy plane. But the risk of it happening was immense. The Cuban leader was in favor of responding to a conventional attack with a nuclear explosion. Years after Khrushchev’s death, Castro began to accuse that Soviet leader for the agreement he had reached with the American president, agreeing to withdraw the missiles from Cuba in exchange for Washington’s commitment not to attack the island and the withdrawal of the missiles. nuclear weapons aimed at the Soviet Union from Turkey.
Russia and the Western powers will walk on the same ledges if they do not manage to reverse the current arm wrestling that they maintain with their elbows resting on Ukraine.
The containment that, in the anteroom of hell, had in 1962 the heads of the Kremlin and the White House, prevented the unleashing of a nuclear war. Will there now be similar peaks of tension over the Ukrainian question?
So far, the war has been through gestures and words launched like projectiles. The accumulation of forces that exceed 150 thousand troops on the western border of Russia, added to the warning that Putin made to Volodymyr Zelensky, certify the prevailing state of war. The Atlantic Alliance would be playing the same game if it is confirmed that, as the Russian military high command maintains, the 56th Artillery Command that operates Pershing missiles with atomic warheads, is deploying medium-range nuclear projectiles (INF).
Such an escalation renders the agreement reached in 1987 by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan remote. That hard-negotiated treaty prohibited the deployment of INF on European territory. But the one who began to dismantle it was Donald Trump when he withdrew from Washington in 2019.
Since then, the strife has become more and more ephemeral. A few days after Putin and Biden agreed at a zoom summit to create a task force to come up with an appeasement plan in Ukraine, the tension escalated again to levels almost as electrifying as that of 1962 when Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro argued at the gates of hell.
