Putin, the backfire

Rarely does anyone manage to earn the old expression "it backfired" as is happening to Vladimir Putin. Leaving for another occasion the global disaster that his image has suffered after the unjustified military aggression in Ukraine, which by the way is still far from being solved, all the results that the increasingly hated character has sought and achieved with such an initiative are backfiring on him.

To begin with, the war that he hoped to turn into a military promenade through a territory that he assumed had little defensive capability has not fulfilled his calculations and perspective. Both the Ukrainian armed forces and the civilian population itself reacted with a patriotism and heroism that immediately frustrated the illusions placed in the occupation of the territory and the surrender under conditions of submission to the Kremlin's discipline similar to those it exercises with other former Soviet republics.

One of the main objectives of control over Ukraine was to prevent the Kiev government and the majority of its citizens from seeking to join NATO, an organisation that would provide them with security and open up access to integration into the European Union, or one that would guarantee them development aid and a greater capacity for presence in international activity, which means being among neighbours who share the same interests. For several years, Moscow-led strategy and shared objectives had held back this possibility.

Paradoxically, however, the intention to nip this possibility in the bud among the Ukrainians, as with others such as the Moldovans, not only turned out to be a failure for Putin: the war and NATO's reaction is not only proving that the Ukrainians were right to try to protect themselves from Russian ambition under the umbrella of the Atlantic Organisation, but the result is that these pretensions, far from being a hypothesis, are now being confirmed. Ukraine will be a NATO member; Russia will not get its way. That option Putin must write off as lost.

The failure does not end there. If Putin sought to limit NATO's capacity and distance it from its borders, Finland's membership and Sweden's forthcoming accession have, as an immediate consequence of the danger demonstrated, increased the number of member countries, strengthened its existing defensive capacity and multiplied the kilometres that limit its borders. Putin has succeeded in revitalising NATO when it appeared to be in decline, reinforcing the need that the Russian threat itself creates and increasing its potential. He wanted less NATO and has succeeded in strengthening, augmenting and enhancing its prestige.

It is not the only thing that Putin's ambition has made difficult for him. Three years ago, without justification beyond ambition, Russia anticipated its propensity to assault Ukrainian sovereignty by seizing the Crimean peninsula overnight. There was little international reaction at the time, with the Kremlin citing historical reasons for its occupation by force and Ukraine not resorting to the inferiority of its troops to defend the territory. The outrage, which the Kremlin has since handled as its own territory without much difficulty, has now re-emerged.

The invasion continues to simmer not only among the inhabitants of the peninsula, who were never consulted, but also in international law, which did not legitimise the occupation. At the time no one seemed to care about the danger of a Russia with a president with Putin's imperial dreams, and the occupation, soon reaffirmed with the construction of a bridge that annexed it to Russian territory, seemed to be forgotten as a fait accompli. In the light of what is now happening, the backward glances are turning and that aggression is returning to the foreground and will be one of the aggravating factors in the conflict that Moscow started then and deserves to be taken into account in the global solutions that are sought to settle it.