Beyond the hypocrisy of table talks: Russian expansionism and the fragile neutrality of Ukraine

In the last days all broadcasted news in tv and articles in the foreign affairs magazines and newspapers are dominated by the episode of the amassing of Russian troops on the Ukraine east borders, that represents a real threat for the maintenance of the peace and stability not only for this country but also, indirectly, for all the western part of the continent, EU, and of the world.

Since the spring of 2021, there were simultaneous war scares in eastern Europe and the western Pacific, due to a Chinese intimidation campaign against Taiwan and a Russian military buildup on the Ukrainian border. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in the latest years of his mandate, having mobilized 175000 troops on Ukraine borders, was threatening to start Europe’s largest war in decades. Hotbed of conflict, in fact, is not only the east of Ukraine but all eastern Europe, first target of russian egemonic policy. Meanwhile, Tehran and Washington looked to be headed for a renewed crisis over Iran’s nuclear program and its drive for regional primacy. This multiple centers of interests in Transatalantic zone and Middle East has been a tough challenge for Biden, who took office hoping to reduce tensions in areas of secondary importance to focus his foreign policy towards his greatest antagonist: China. USA defense strategy has internationally come out of balance, with responsibilities highly surpassing the effective coercive means. Biden is getting closer with Russia holding periodical virtual meetings with Putin in a bid to establish a “stable and predictable” relationship, fearing not only it further takes the distance from Americans polarizing its sphere of influence in its satellite states and buffer zones but also globally putting on stage a blatant volte-face. He sought to find a path back to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, thereby reducing the growing risk of confrontation in the Middle East; withdraw his troops in Afghanistan refocusing attention and resources on the Indo-Pacific and contrasted the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline linking Russia and western Europe, avoiding Berlin’s cooperation vis-à-vis with Beijing.

Biden’s Pentagon likewise spent 2021 focusing on how to deter or defeat Chinese aggression, “prioritizing China and its military modernization” as its pacing challenge.

Most problematic of all, U.S. relations with Iran and Russia has worsened, instead of ameliorating.

In fact, as it was not enough, Putin has authorized significant cyberattacks against critical infrastructure in the US. He threatened war against Ukraine in the spring and has now mobilized forces for what U.S. officials fear could be a major invasion and prolonged occupation of that country. It would be the third invasion in eight years. To preserve the peace, Moscow has demanded an acknowledged Russian sphere of influence and the rollback of NATO’s military presence in eastern Europe. The US could find itself facing grave security crises in Europe and the Middle East in addition to persistent tensions in the Pacific and these possibilities hint at a deeper problem in U.S. statecraft: his strategic overstretch. Already under Obama’s presidency, it was an open question whether the US could defeat China if Beijing assaulted Taiwan, or Russia if Moscow invaded the Baltic region. The most upsetting danger is that the US could have to fight wars against China and Russia at the same time, exposing to crisis the one-war military defence strategy. The geopolitical costs of true retrenchment and the financial costs of rearmament seem to surpass and take over confusion.

Putin has issued a stark ultimatum, asking for the US make “reliable and firm legal guarantees” that NATO will not expand eastward or else Russia will invade Ukraine to preserve its corridor to Crimea and a buffer zone in Donbas. Promises that could not be done by Americans and that on the contrary has been the only logic counterattack to his move. As a matter of facts, all the world is observing a standstill point in this “high-stakes gamble” but seems unlikely that Russia could really take such a decision, given the determination demonstrated by the secretary of State Anthony Blinken, in order to demonstrate and to act to be once again the giant that is never more from more about a century by now and finally ended with the dissolution of URSS in the ‘90s. It’s only a fact of old memories.

Putin’s keep on menacing that, cementing the alliance’s status quo, a deadly European war and a devastating conflict could come could be avoided, really conscious not be in the position to bear such a responsibility.

History shows that pledges of neutrality by Ukraine or any other country in the region do nothing to abate Putin’s appetite; rather, they feed it. Cannot be ignored Putin aggressive intentions, not only in a large-scale invasion of Ukraine now on the table, but also for his ambition to rearrange Europe’s security architecture to the detriment of the West. Evidently, he’s raving and he’s animated by a spirit of self-destruction with an ardent will of immolating itself in a suicide adventure! After a long time in which the West has listened Putin pretentions it’s come the moment to react with strength and clear voice, and taking stock of the situation.

It is obvious why Russia demands that Ukraine give up its ambitions for membership in the EU and NATO, but it is far less clear why anyone in the West should echo these ill-conceived suggestions. The people of Ukraine made a choice in 2013, after Ukrainian President Yanukovych, acting at Putin’s behest, sought to contravene public opinion and integrate the country with Russia instead of the EU. Consequently, Ukrainians took to the streets in the so-called Euromaidan protests that Yanukovych tried to brutally suppress, but he underestimated the will of Ukrainians, who responded with fury and ousted him. Ukrainians have no interest in cozying up to Russia and will never give up on integrating with the West. Putin, however, seemed not to have learned that lesson. In response to Ukraine’s orientation in 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine, occupied Crimea, and launched a deadly war in the Donbas in a blietzkrieg, taking the lion’s share with the white flies in an initiative that had doubtful consequences.

Putin greatly underestimated Ukrainian resolve and faced a massive response by a population poorly equipped but highly motivated that reduced Putin’s grand designs to a years-long stalemate on a tiny fraction of land near the Ukrainian border. The West—the US, the EU, and NATO—did too little, too late in imposing in July 2014 serious economic sanctions, isolating Russia and adjusting its policies. But its indecisiveness invited more aggressive actions from Russia, such as cyberattacks, election meddling, and targeted assassinations of opponents abroad.

In the years after Russia’s intervention, Ukrainians doubled down on their choice to align themselves with the West, enshrining in their constitution in 2018 the goals of EU and NATO membership.

Thus at the moment, Ukrainian neutrality is key to resolving the crisis, as testified in the events of 2014 with its straight neutral and even more four years earlier, putting an end to its ambitions for NATO membership passing a law stating that it was a nonaligned country that had no intention of joining any military alliance, backing instead since Euromaidan protests in 2013 an economic and political integration with the EU. If neutrality failed to stop Putin from launching a war in 2014, it is hard to see why it would stop him now.

Another ill-advised idea proposed by some experts is to pressure Ukraine into one-sided concessions, granting compromises that will supposedly make Putin more pacific but history teaches Ukraine that Moscow is never able to play the role of the mediator as demonstrated in Donetsk and Luhansk, the two Russian-occupied regions in the east of Ukraine and in Moldova’s Transnistria neutral region still occupied by Russian forces alike.

The fact that Putin is searching for a new ideological justification concerning Ukraine suggests that he really is on the verge of something big: an attempt to fundamentally rewrite the post–Cold War security order in Europe. Having created a crisis, he hopes to invite U.S. President Joe Biden to the negotiating table to solve it. There, he fantasizes, the two leaders will draw new lines across Europe, partitioning the continent into new spheres of influence. Russia is a master of selling lies, and keep on making poor figures on the international stage with its illegitimate and ridiculous demands for guarantees and one-sided concessions. But NATO ignore it and even doesn’t give the satisfaction of rejecting its ultimatums. They simply ignore them as much as they can and, meanwhile, the US and its European allies strengthen their efforts to deter Russia. The only effective way forward is the deterrence plan that Ukraine and its partners are currently crafting in order to send out a clear message to Moscow: Ukraine, staunchly propending to the West and aspiring to be a future member of the EU and NATO that are declaring that its sovereignty and territorial integrity are nonnegotiable by laws, is being defended by their prompt reaction according which in the worst-case scenario of an invasion, the West will enact severe sanctions, and by the provision of weaponry, training and personnel.

Ukraine’s goal is simple: peace through strength. For now, the US and its European allies should talk to Putin to win time while strengthening Ukraine. It’s hard to think that, given Nato proximity, 44 million Ukrainians would not be sensitive to the temptation to become part of it.

Thus, the noise of Russia's "drumbeat of war" on Ukraine is a pressing warning siren, getting Iran back into the agreement that would keep it from building a nuclear weapon. Iran's nuclear escalation is eliminating, in fact, the substance of the JCPOA reached in Vienna on 14 July 2015, between Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UNSC—China, France, Russia, UK, US—plus Germany) together with the EU. After the Trump administration twice certified Iran's compliance in 2017, in May 2018 the United States withdrew from JCPOA as Trump pledged he would negotiate a better deal. Trump left office without fulfilling that pledge and analysts determined Iran had moved closer to developing a nuclear weapon since the American withdrawal even if the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ensures that an atomic bomb is "haram" or forbidden in Islam.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Moscow no longer shares a land border with Iran, but the last thing Russia wants is another nuclear war and, bringing China into the equation, this quickly becomes a three-dimensional chess. While concerned about a broader conflict in the Middle East that could disrupt some of its energy supplies, China shares few of Russia's fears of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Back to Ukraine border crisis, the Secretary of State Blinken is supporting this nation and intensifying the meetings with Zelensky, swearing sanctions against Russian hegemonic ambitions to make an invasion in this satellite country to get a breakthrough to the sea waters by an expansion to Crimea and taming Donbass turmoil.

Ukraine is in a shrill division between the wish to belong to EU and Nato and the will not to enter in conflict with the atavic allied Russia, in which area of influence it belongs, that regardless this brotherhood tie is keen to protect its geopolitical standpoint in the East and protect its economic profits deriving from the gas pipeline connecting it to Germany and central Europe. From the international negotiations and formal and informal talks it’s been looming the idea of a Ukraine integration in Nato without the acquisition of a formal status. This could be considered a huge point under the profile of the partition of the sphere of influence but that risks to be inconsistent as a matter of facts. Both EU and Nato in fact are pursuing a policy of the open door, that, as clearly stated, doesn’t involve an effective inclusion as there’s a long road to follow for this country to belong to these organizations and to build up a strong democracy, not only for economic reasons but also because of the burden of their traditions. Moscow choice of amassing troupes at the east border of Ukraine is in fact a peril to the whole east Europe. This stance dates back to the ancestral competition and aversion with the capitalistic western society and a Europe that is even overcoming the power of dollar at detriment of the national claims of popular sovereignty that are increasing in all their vehemence and rioting strength in the womb of the EU that, despite a roman catholic common tradition, is essentially kept united by financial and economic needs more than from a natural will of conjunction in order to not sink under the weight of the pressures coming from both the eastern (Russia) and the western side (USA) and to bring a stability and to represent a balancing zone of mediation, pursuing the purpose of all international organizations, both with a regional and universal vocation, to live peacefully in an egualitarian society in which all the States are put in the condition to sit down together at the same level, as equals in which are ensured and guaranteed the protections of the enshrined rights and freedoms, have the same economic power and sustainability, social perequation and redistribution of resources in the twilight of the ideological and financial egemonic pretentions all over the world wherever coming from.

On the other side of the planet, Blinken, as representative of a Nato Member State, is trying to create a unified front against Russian cyberattacks and military menaces of aggression, played out as simple training in a ridiculous stance that hide a nation unnerved by its military efforts, economic screwing and bringing forward an ideological belief, the communism, that doesn’t accept to be by now from so long definitely died, surpassed, and that haven’t never found an acceptable match in the reality of the working people that hoped to find out a real social redistribution of resources and social justice.

In conclusion, everyone talk about a world of equals, but each one pursuit oligarchic interests of predominance and the only solution prospected since the end of the WWII if we don’t want to re-plung in another planetarian destructive escalation of conflict is leaving a way, to give room to the liberal and democratic western organization that, through delicate equilibrium games, infinite rounds of negotiations, talks, the art of diplomacy are the only actors that keep on searching to achieve this aim for all, through the struggle of the ideological and religious beliefs, that have incontestably been at the origin of the deepest injustices, crimes and terror that have always destroyed entire civil societies trapped in webs of illusions and unrealistic dreams of personal and social redemption, through the delivering of humanitarian aids for societies wounded by starvation and diseases, dragged in lunatic wars that more and more drift apart from the real need of the individual in a politics that is no more on a human scale, where very often, as already criticized in the western world by many sides, and even deeper in the Middle East countries, is alarmingly on the rise a crisis of the democratic representativeness, that suffers more and more pitiless stabs in a desert of desperation and death in which “everybody for oneself”, and again through the imposition of sanctions inducing to shifts of often embezzling positions, changes of attitudes and behaviours of often authoritarian and autocratic political leaders, avoiding and escaping nuclear lethal threats and an irresponsible use of the technology, science and research not addressed to make progressist solutions of twistedness that tight humanity in a grip, that is not put at the service of the wellbeing and interests of the community but that are used to enhance the controls more and more closed down and arbitrary espionages in a society more and more paranoid in which wins the mentality of suspect behind the smiles of false or pretended collaborations and hands shakes of more and more ambiguous diplomatic attempts to reach agreements in which is hard to realize the common welfare, in which every parts remains always circumspect to be stabbed in the back and duplicity and in which is stressed a generalised crisis just of the reciprocal trust and of the existence of a real cooperation between the people other than between governors, beyond the fact to sit together to the same institutional tables of negotiations, official State visits, and you may wonder if there is a real possibility of compromise, if someone really want to yield something in order to receive something, in a positive do ut des, in order to achieve important results, if there is a real will to not entrench oneself in one’s position, if there is a logic of dialogue and an open mentality or each one is barricaded behind one’s own beliefs, trying to persuade or even worse impose one’s own perspective over that of the others and you may wonder what has been the sense of putting together a gathering of so different States in the womb of the international organizations and who really want to achieve common aims and a good benefit that seems so difficult to realize in practice other than with words and beyond the spread out common hypocrisy to which we all are well acquainted, caused by the fear of military, political and ideological retaliations and you may wonder if there is any more a status of security that would have been the main achievement and purpose of the over-financed and backed Nato that keeps of making military installations and spent billion dollars in often useless investigations.