Korea and Ukraine: three possible analogies
Rewinding the reel of history another twenty years and always remaining in East Asia, the international event to mention is the signing of the armistice in Korea on July 27, 1953. Where are the possible analogies with the war in Ukraine? According to what Gideon Rachman wrote in the «Financial Times» days ago, «there are three references: neither Russia nor Ukraine are able to achieve a total victory; the political positions of the two sides remain too distant to reach and sign a peace agreement; both countries are suffering huge losses of life.’
Putin failed at the start of the offensive to occupy the capital Kiev and saw his soldiers driven back from Kherson and Kharkiv; Zelensky leads a country destroyed by bombing and Russian missiles, with Ukrainian cities where drinking water, electricity and heating are lacking in several areas. The Ukrainian president’s goal of retaking all the occupied territories, including Crimea (annexed by Moscow in 2014), makes us imagine even more brutal fighting, after the atrocities already committed by Russian soldiers in ten months of war. A cease-fire, on the other hand, would favor the sending of international aid for reconstruction; South Korea was also completely devastated after three years of war, while today it is a developed and prosperous country.
Italians probably first heard of Crimea at school, studying the Risorgimento, when there was the expedition of Cavour’s Bersaglieri. But Sevastopol has been home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet since the time of Tsarina Catherine II in the late 18th century. In 1954 the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (a native of an area on the border between Russia and Ukraine) “gave” Crimea to Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union (after the end of the USSR, Kiev kept Crimea, allowing the presence of the Russian fleet in Sevastopol with a bilateral agreement).
General MacArthur, the blue-eyed shogun
To go into the details of the Korean War, we kept as a source the volume “Ten years that changed the world, 1941-1951 – Political and diplomatic history of the war in the Pacific” (Corbaccio, 1995), written by Giorgio Borsa (1912-2002 ), distinguished scholar of Gandhi and the Asian world, for over thirty years professor at the University of Pavia. In the Far East, the military victory over Japan in August 1945 was largely the work of the United States; thus the occupation of the country after the surrender was an internal American affair. Washington delegated full powers to General Douglas MacArthur, who in the Empire of the Rising Sun was immediately nicknamed the “shogun blue-eyed”, a Japanese word which literally means “generalissimo”, but which indicated the head of the feudal government (a position that became hereditary of the Tokugawa family), which ended in 1868.
In Korea, however, the Americans were not ready to occupy the entire peninsula (subject to Japanese sovereignty since 1910) and stopped after reaching the capital Seoul, proposing to the Soviets – who accepted – the division of the country along the line of the 38th parallel. Within a few months, therefore, two embryonic Korean states were formed: a communist north, a pro-Western south.