Desolation. Rage. Desire to abjure the bipedal species. Deep sadness and bewilderment. Not even in the darkest of my nightmares would I have imagined that the bravado of Vladimir Putin would culminate in the invasion of Ukraine, just as the Ukrainian president did not foresee it, Volodymyr Zelensky, who last week assured: “There is no reason to panic.” Skirmishes could venture in the Donbas region, divided into the ‘oblast’ (administrative units) of Donetsk and Lugansk, whose independence has already been recognized by the Kremlin, but never one of the times that Russian tanks would reach Kiev. Once again the edge of the scythe hangs over old Europe, where every centimeter of border is a poorly sewn scar. Blood, refugees, broken lives, devastated economies… Again? What madness is this?
I talk to Yuri, my great Russian friend; although in Moscow it seems that nothing is happening, the tension is palpable in the cold air. Few people dare to protest against the war in a country where demonstrations are prohibited. Queues at the banks. People who wander around sad and disoriented. The feeling that the dramatic turn of events will inflict damage on them, a lot of damage. Shame. How could it have happened?
An implacable ‘fatum’, between submission and violence, seems to hover over these lands
A gentle geography, with immense cereal plains, blurs the concept of a border between the two countries, especially with regard to the eastern half of Ukraine. Russians and Ukrainians are brother peoples, with two similar languages and centuries of history in common, often tragic, since a succession of dark nightmares is chained in it: the revolution, the civil war, the agrarian collectivization and the consequent famine (the ‘holomodor’ caused in Ukraine between 1.5 and 5 million dead), the Stalinist purges, the Gulag, the bleeding of the world conflict, the Soviet and post-Soviet fiasco. And now a “special military operation” with unforeseeable consequences. It seems that an implacable ‘fatum’ hangs over these lands, that of “being trapped between servitude and anarchy, between resignation and violence”, writes Natacha Wodin in the overwhelming work ‘My mother was from Mariúpol’ (Asteroid Books).
This new blow, the invasion, is unjustifiable, it has no excuse from any point of view, but Putinan evil gambler with better cards than we suspect, is not the only culprit of the disaster The infamous stew began to cook 30 years ago. When the ‘perestroika’ of Mikhail Gorbachev, when the end of the Cold War was in sight, there was talk of the construction at the end of a common European house, with its integrated security, at whose door Moscow knocked. But no. The United States, with the acquiescence of a submissive Europe, tightened the fence, extending NATO to the Easttaking advantage of the infernal mess that was experienced under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin… Against whom was the Alliance expanding? Who was then the enemy? In the same way, in the 1990s, the neoliberal reform was introduced, a ‘shock therapy’ encouraged by the West in the belief that the laws of the market would themselves regulate the pandemonium, a brutal change, a deep wound, a process in which both Russia and Ukraine saw their economies and resources looted. At the time, the economist Grigory Yavlinsky He came to design a kind of Marshall plan so that the international financial powers would help the USSR during the dramatic transition to the market economy, a project that did not materialize. Allowing the collapse of the USSR was cheaper.
The Putin factor responds in part to the historical humiliation after the fall of the USSR
The Putin factor responds in part to that historical humiliation (I insist: I do not justify, I only try to contextualize). The proposal that Moscow put on the table on December 17 did not seem so far-fetched, at least to sit down, to gain time: Kiev’s resignation from NATO and the withdrawal of the Alliance to its pre-enlargement limits. Of course, Ukraine is a sovereign country with the right to enter wherever it pleases, but it also Russia’s misgivings are understandable. Perhaps the solution would have been the ‘Finlandization’ of Ukraine, the maintenance of a policy of neutrality so that the country could consolidate its political and economic independence and, at the same time, maintain good-neighbourly relations with Russia.
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Is it already too late? I do not know. Should NATO apply a military corrective? I trust that not, that the storm calms down. I look for light and consolation in books, in Tolstoy, for whom war was contrary to reason and to all human nature. “Over all that field, once so gay and beautiful […]now rose a mist impregnated with moisture and smoke […]. Small clouds gathered and a fine rain began to fall on the dead and wounded, on frightened, exhausted, hesitant men, as if saying to them: ‘Enough, enough, humans! stop… Reconsider… What are you doing?’». Quote taken from the magnificent translation of ‘War and Peace’, by Joaquín Fernández-Valdés, published by Alba Editorial in 2021.