The mainstream press has spilled rivers of ink to support a monolithic thesis, that the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, is a brigand, a ruthless tyrant, against a free, democratic and harmless country.
The year 2025 that has just begun is also the third year of a bloody war between Ukrainians and Russians, which has seen a country of over 40,000,000 inhabitants fall into ruin, with millions of displaced persons and 6,500,000 emigrants outside the national borders.
In our parts, the great mainstream press, instead of rivers of blood - much, much better! - has spilled rivers of ink to demonstrate and support a monolithic thesis, namely that the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, is a brigand, a murderer, a ruthless tyrant, who has unleashed himself against a free, democratic and harmless country out of a simple thirst for conquest.
As has always happened in similar circumstances, propaganda prevailed over in-depth historical-political analysis of a conflict that could have been avoided and in any case stopped within the first months of the war – just ask Boris Johnson, alias Winston Churchill in pocket format.
I have already discussed the topic here on several occasions[1]. I am bringing it up again now because it seems to me that what was argued then still has validity and concreteness and that Trump's arrival in the White House could be – perhaps malgré lui – a decisive event to put an end to hostilities.
Let's take a longer route. The inconsistency of the "end of history" of Fukuyama's memory now seems irrefutable, with a unipolar world, governed by liberal democracy and the market, now free from the bonds of politics and destined to set out on the path of progress without adjectives.More than a generation after the fall of the Wall, the global reality is very different. The monopolar power has proven incapable of effectively exercising the imperium - see the ignominious conclusion of the campaign in Afghanistan, but also the failure of the so-called "Arab springs", which have left behind only rubble and blood.
And if the hegemony of military force shows cracks, the cultural one is actually on the verge of collapse. Looking at the political map of the Earth, one clearly sees the isolation and minority of what we continue to call "the West". The absence of politics and from politics (record rates of abstention from voting, the primary rite of liberal democracies) is bearing its ripe fruits, with the free deployment of "animal spirits", the abnormal growth of financial capital and that linked to communication technologies, the spread of poor work and an employment rate that, where it is growing, is nevertheless not able to solve the problems of social hardship and marginalization (jobless Recovery).
However, the US still remains the world's leading power, which must compete with fearsome adversaries such as China, but also - although less explicitly for now - India and Brazil. Not to mention Africa, where Nigeria and South Africa are growing exponentially (the former now has 216,000,000 inhabitants, the latter 62,000,000).
In this context of weaknesses and dangerous and ungoverned frictions in the fault zones (the Balkans, the Near and Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa) the war between Russia and Ukraine plays a central role.
The US, absolute masters of NATO at whose head they have placed a very bellicose Mark Rutte, having full awareness that the decisive battle will be played out with China in the Indo-Pacific, do not want to leave behind allies who can exercise any degree of autonomy and, in extreme cases, prove unruly to Washington's orders.
The EU, reduced to an inconsistent self-referential political spectrum, still represents a context of approximately 450,000,000 inhabitants and with a total GDP of 17,000 million Euros, roughly equal to the Chinese GDP.
Until Angela Merkel left the scene in 2021, on the trade level the EU boasted an enormous surplus with the USA (500 billion Euros of exports, against 300 billion of imports). Faced with a very complex internal situation and crossed by deep lines of social fracture, with the crisis of the middle class, but also of the blue collars due to an ungoverned globalization, the reaction could not be long in coming. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024 is the result.
Before the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in 2022, the United States also faced the grave danger of a stable interrelation between Russian raw materials (primarily gas) and European technological and transformation capabilities: it was necessary to interrupt that stable interrelation, even at the cost of handing Russia over to the true antagonist of the USA at the beginning of the 21st century, China.
.And here, long prepared through continuous provocations (see the latest NATO exercise on the borders of Russia, explicitly called “Anaconda”), the unfortunate Russian invasion of the predominantly Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine has arrived.
Without any hope of victory – it was enough to consult the De Agostini Geographic Calendar to realize this – thousands and thousands of young Ukrainians were sent into the fray, to whom, as Domenico Quirico, one of the few free voices informed on the facts, says, we should all apologize[2]. Sorry for having believed – or pretended to believe – in Zelenski’s “victory plan”, the ubiquitous advocate of weapons and nothing else
.As has always been known, if you want to win a war you have to put your “boots on the ground”. No aerial bombardment or missile launch, if not atomic, has ever been decisive for the outcome of a conflict.
If Europe and the United States had truly cared about the Ukrainian cause, following in the footsteps of the authentic Churchill, not his Johnsonian caricature, they should have sent their own troops to the front, to fight the tyrant, the “Asian barbarism.”.
Knowing that they did not have public opinion behind them, mostly always against the war, they instead preferred to "commercialize" the conflict, sending billions of weapons to Ukraine, thus replenishing the coffers of their own arms industries and, above all, without having to count the coffins of the fallen, as at the time of the - lost - wars of Vietnam and Afghanistan.
I spoke before of "Asian barbarism". Here lies a crucial point that should be resolved preliminarily: is Russia part of Asia or Europe? The eastern borders of our continent have moved further and further east and with the "European" Tsar Peter the Great, they reached the Urals and the Ural River, closing themselves between the Caspian and the Sea of Azov and excluding the Caucasus[3].
Charles De Gaulle, in fact, conceived of a Europe "from the Atlantic to the Urals". However, it is well known that his attitude towards the United States was not exactly friendly.
In our major newspapers, however, the idea is leaked that Russia remains essentially an “Aneuropean” country, a sort of Halb Asien, “half Asia”, as defined by the Austrian writer Karl Emil Franzos, born in 1848 in Chortkiv, in what was then Austro-Hungarian Galicia, now in Ukrainian territory[4].
It seems that the ancestral terror for the boundless Russian plains is still alive, from whose depths bloodthirsty and destructive hordes arose, a terror then amplified in the twentieth century by the “otherness” of the Soviet model, in antithesis to the liberal-libertarian one[5]
.Yet it is difficult to believe that the country of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tchaikovsky, of so many illustrious scientists and artists who have made a fundamental contribution to European culture does not belong to our civilization[6].
If Russia is Europe itself, then the path to take should not be that of raising a new “Iron Curtain” (this time not against ideological contagion, but against a new and ferocious tsar), but that of a gradual and albeit difficult integration of Russia into Europe (“from the Atlantic to the Urals”, precisely). Today this path seems particularly arduous and largely compromised, but in my opinion, it is inevitable to take it.
.If we had acted in this direction (and we must admit that Silvio Berlusconi had sensed it in 2002 with the meeting at the Pratica di Mare summit), the Russian-Ukrainian conflict would not have even been conceived. Instead, the monopolar perspective of an integration/submission of Western Europe to the USA has won – for now (see the role of total subjection of the UK).
In this sense, it is clear that the battle for Donbass, lined with philistinism and patriotic rhetoric[7], finds its reason for being in wanting to move the borders of Europe much further west. A border that, quite clearly, is the one that the United States wants to draw, in view of the “final clash” with China.
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[1] 24 febbraio 2022, Il conflitto in Ucraina e il peso della storia; 27 agosto 2022, Più armi!; 13 settembre 2022, Uno spiraglio di pace?; 28 gennaio 2023, Un anno di guerra; 2 marzo 2023, rec. a Benjamin ABELOW, Come l’Occidente ha provocato la guerra in Ucraina, prefazione di Luciano CANFORA, Fazi, Roma 2022, pp. 81; 28 febbraio 2024, Il paradosso è servito.
[2] “La stampa”, 22.12.24: “L’impossibilità di vincere in Ucraina riporta l’Occidente alla realtà dei fatti.”
[3] Today the European border is drawn on the watershed of the Caucasus mountain range.
[4] Aus Halb-Asien, Culturbilder aus Galizien, der Bukowina, Südrussland und Rumänien, Leipzig 1876.
[5] “The Horde looked out, and saw the plain, / the white cities by the rivers, / and blond crops and oxen grazing. /
It came out longing, and the world became bread for it.” tr. from “Gog and Magog” by Giovanni Pascoli (1904).
[6] Let us remember the shame of the exclusion of Russian artists and Russian authors (Dostoevsky!) from the Italian stage and theaters in the first year of the war.
[7] How many yellow-blue flags and what about the suits with the same colors flaunted by Ursula von der Leyen! Waving, indeed, without substance.