War Russia Ukraine, the international arrest warrant for Putin
On the eve of the meeting in Moscow with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Putin has received an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court on charges of deporting thousands of Ukrainian children. A signal to the world about what is today Kremlin who replied: “Only toilet paper”. Now, if Putin leaves Russia, he risks being arrested and, as Ukraine’s attorney general Andrij Kostin underlined: “World leaders will think three times before shaking his hand or sitting at the negotiating table with him”.
Already. But this does not help to find a diplomatic way to resolve the conflict. Not only. The Independent International Commission of the UN has just “certified” the horrors committed by the Russians in Ukraine: “War crimes including willful killings, attacks on civilians, illegal imprisonment, torture, torture with electric shocks, even emasculation, rape, forced transfers and deportations of children”. Real acts and facts which, however, cannot make us forget the limits and mistakes of the Ukrainians and, more generally, of the West, headed by the USA. What to say? That war is always deadly and exceedingly complex: simplifying it does not help to stop it.
The situation, already very heavy after more than a year of the Russian aggression of Ukraine with consequent devastation of the same, already over 400,000 dead between the parties, international tension never so high since 1945, risks degenerating. Ukraine has not only become the theater of a national liberation struggle of a sovereign state against the Russian aggressor but the main knot which, if not untied in time, can blow up peaceful world coexistence. So he can’t figure it out because Putin doesn’t want to hear reason: he just wants to end the game in his favor by bringing Ukraine back to what used to be the borders of the USSR.
War Ukraine, Putin wants a Europe submissive to the Kremlin
Not only that: for Putin this is the war of resistance to the West which “wants to erase Russia and put the noose on the southern hemisphere”. Putin did not attack Ukraine for a “local territorial” issue but to put his expansionist plan into practice with Russia committed to recovering what it had lost after the collapse of communism in 19991, to reaffirm religious primacy, detach Europe from the USA, becoming prey to Russian expansionist aims. Putin wants a Europe submissive to the Kremlin and the patriarchate of Moscow by implementing what not even his predecessors, from Ivan the Terrible to Stalin, could. All under Moscow, all Orthodox, by hook or by crook. For the Kremlin, Europe is an open field, without US support, easy prey. This is why, according to the Rais of Moscow, Europe must cut ties with the USA. In this framework there is no possibility of peace without the complete withdrawal of Russian forces outside the internationally recognized borders of Ukraine and the complete abandonment by Putin’s Russia of its aggressive policy. Russia has launched an unprovoked war in Europe, in clear violation of international law and in particular of the United Nations. Here we are. The repeated packages of EU and US sanctions have hurt Moscow but have not led Putin to change his line of aggression. After more than a year, the situation seems blocked and tending towards the worst. On the military level, Russia has not managed to break through even if it has deployed all its strength, with the exclusion of its atomic arsenal.
Ukrainian war, Biden and the American offensive in May
For the USA, the Russian army and the Wagner mercenaries are in great trouble and also in arms difficulties. The stalemate appears to be at a turning point with Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin’s March 15 announcement of an imminent counteroffensive in Ukraine scheduled for late spring, as early as next May: “There is no time to lose. We are assembling the weapons and military means that will allow the Ukrainians to reconquer the lost territory”. So Biden seems to abandon the “gradualist” and wait-and-see line he has been pursuing for months to avoid direct confrontation with Russia. It is the first time that the USA has spoken of a military offensive in support of Ukraine (is Crimea also in the bill?) while being very careful not to enter the conflict directly. So, message loud and clear.
Given that Putin does not want to listen to “reasons”, for the US and its NATO allies there is no other way out than to aim explicitly at the Kremlin’s military defeat. Only then can peace negotiations be opened. Needless to hide that this decision is full of pitfalls and risks. What will be Putin’s reaction on the military and international diplomatic fields? Of course, that US is not a threat made up of words alone. History teaches.
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