Ukraine may be just the beginning

Forty-one years and one day after Tejero's buffoonery in Congress, Putin has invaded Ukraine in blood and fire. It seems that 23 and 24 February oscillate between the grotesque and the tragic. When Russian tanks penetrate Ukraine and their planes and missiles destroy its infrastructure, not only military, Putin's final plans are not yet known because he hides them and when he speaks he lies shamelessly. It is not for nothing that he and his minister Lavrov have spent weeks assuring that they were not going to invade and that it was all NATO intoxication and disinformation, while Biden was the only one who warned that the invasion was imminent to a world that did not want to believe him and branded him as an exaggerator. Putin has lost all credibility, though he never claimed that invading Ukraine would keep him awake at night. He belongs to the group of those who prefer "alternative truths", i.e. lies. Whatever he says now, we will not believe him.

And that is why we are still not sure what his ultimate goal is because my impression is that Ukraine is a mere pawn in a much larger game. In the short term, Russian troops are encountering considerable resistance and that this is preventing them from progressing as quickly as they had planned, although the end result is a foregone conclusion because the brave Ukrainian military and civilians will not be able to hold out indefinitely against one of the most powerful armies in the world. And here we must pay tribute to the gallant attitude of President Zelenski who remains in Kiev leading the resistance. Perhaps because he realises that the occupation is going to be very costly, Putin is asking the Ukrainian army to do his dirty work for him, to stage a coup, overthrow the legitimate government and then surrender so that he can put a puppet of Moscow at his head to end the war... at the price of converting the citizens of a country where the war has been waged... at the price of turning citizens of a country with many corruption problems, but free, into subjects of a foreign and neighbouring dictatorship, no less corrupt, as an intermediate step towards the phagocytisation of the country, as is the case with Belarus, which is already in an advanced process of digestion. With his aggressive behaviour Putin is reneging on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum whereby Ukraine renounced its nuclear weapons (transferred to Russia) in exchange for a guarantee of its borders from Moscow, a guarantee that is also given by the founding Treaty of Lisbon; also gives it the founding treaty of the OSCE, signed by the USSR and later endorsed by Russia. Trump is not alone in blithely violating signed treaties.

Europeans and Americans are watching in dismay, sending lethal weapons from the common budget (something that is happening for the first time) and humanitarian aid to Ukraine and imposing harsh sanctions on Russia, which are not going to change the final outcome of this war because Putin was counting on them and has already discounted them, although they are probably greater, much greater, than he expected. Biden has explained that sanctions are the alternative to World War III. Let us hope that the price does not also include Ukrainian freedom.

The fear is that once Putin has taken off his mask he is not going to stop in Ukraine and if what came before was bad what is coming may be worse. Belarus has called a referendum to install Russian nuclear weapons on its soil, and with the percentages of votes Lukashenko gets in every election no one doubts the outcome of the referendum will be largely favourable. So there will be Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus, on top of practically all the Baltic States and Poland, who are all in over their heads, and I understand them very well. What's more, lest there be any doubt about Russia's desire to create a security glacis around its borders and a zone of influence a little further afield, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has issued a stern warning to Sweden and Finland not to join NATO because it would have "harmful military and political consequences". Let them not say later that they were not warned. The warning came when the Finnish prime minister told parliament that "Finland is prepared to ask to join NATO if the national security issue becomes more acute". That Finland is now considering such a step reveals the understandable fear in their hearts. As a rhetorical question, I wonder how we would react if the Russian bear were to paw at Finland tomorrow, which like Ukraine is not a NATO member, because that may turn out to be the real problem. And even if there are no military strikes, Russia could conceivably respond to sanctions with other economic measures, but also with cyber attacks on these countries or on NATO members that affect basic infrastructure (water, electricity, financial or health services, etc.) because such attacks could be considered acts of war. How will we respond? Or rather, how will the Americans, who are the only ones who can really do so, respond? For the time being, former President Medvedev already considered three years ago that the exclusion of the Swift payment system - as has now happened - would be tantamount to "military aggression".

As it turns out, two-thirds of Americans have no idea where Ukraine is and are unable to locate it on a map, and more than 60% were opposed before the invasion to getting involved in the current crisis and imposing sanctions on Russia because they did not want to get involved in more wars and because it also makes it more expensive to fill up their car's fuel tank. I suppose that the harshness of the images on television will have led them to change their minds. But Biden, who already has a very difficult time with the midterm elections this summer, cannot be unaware of this mood, and yet he has no choice but to act firmly because what is at stake goes beyond borders and the security architecture in Europe, since Russia's ambition is to be considered a great power on a par with the US and China and to move towards a multipolar regime that divides the world into spheres of influence in constant tension with each other. And if that happens, global security will be affected. However far that may look from Arkansas. Not to stop Putin now is to guarantee more serious problems tomorrow.

That Junqueras has said that the crisis in Ukraine resembles the situation in Catalonia because "there is external aggression there by a state that wants to impose itself and is conditioned by its internal authoritarian temptations", adding later that "in our case, three quarters of the same thing", seems to me to place him almost on the same level as Colonel Tejero in terms of national absurdity. There are people whose intelligence haunts them, but when certain subjects are touched upon they are quicker, much quicker.    There is nothing more different here than Zelenski's behaviour compared to that of Puigdemont.

Jorge Dezcallar