Riding chariots of fire and winged horses, the Valkyries cross the sky to retrieve the bodies and weapons of fallen warriors. They take them to Valhalla. There the dead will help Odin in the battles that will decide the fate of the gods. The strings of the violins make a restless, obsessive and torn music, while the brass of the orchestra vibrates with stridency and military rhythm. Who has not heard the prelude to the third act of Die Walküre by Richard Wagner?
This piece by Wagner, it is known, was very popular with the Nazis. We associate it with mythologies of war: aggressive ads, violent video games, the helicopter bombing in Apocalypse Now. Perhaps for this reason, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a friend of Putin, named his mercenary army, one of his many companies, with the Wagner surname. The other day, Enric Juliana, speaking of Morocco, recalled the presence in the Sahel of these troops with extremely modern technology, but so similar to the mercenary armies of the Middle Ages.
Wagner’s militiamen are not only fighting in Africa and Syria. They have roamed the Donbass since 2014. Arming and protecting separatist groups. It is true that the Americans transgressed the unwritten pact with Gorbachev and, once the iron curtain collapsed, they threw NATO to the door of Russia. It is true that in the Donbass there was pro-Russian sensitivity and disgust with a nationally homogenized and pro-Western Ukraine. But it is also true that the dissonances in the area were fueled by Wagner’s mercenaries. They gangrened the conflict until it became an ethnic war.
Accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the Wagner militias are known for their ferocity and neo-Nazi mysticism. In recent months, 40,000 common prisoners (many of them murderers and rapists) have been enrolled in their battalions. Some 30,000 have died, subjected to suicide tactics. Prison fodder turned into cannon fodder, under the threat of their own bullets and with the incentive of personal freedom and the spoils of conquest (including rape).
Last week, while Zelensky was begging for help in Europe, remembering that the value of freedom, so precious in the West, is at stake in this war, Putin published an article in which he specified Russia’s strategic objectives: Novorossiya. He claims historical rights not just over the Donbass, but over the entire Ukrainian strip of the Black Sea: from Transnistria (in present-day Moldova) and Odessa to Kharkiv.
Putin maintains that this area was part of tsarist Russia, although, inexplicably, Lenin gave it to the Soviet republic of Ukraine. The New Russia would make the Ukrainian state unfeasible, which would lose access to the sea.
European public opinion is beginning to show signs of fatigue. Russian opinion, accustomed to suffering, does not seem affected. While their prisoners die killing, 150,000 young people are training to go to the front in spring.
The dead in Ukraine, on the other hand, no longer have relief. Will our old Leopards be the ones to stop the Russia that once again dreams of being tsarist? Experts say that the US has marked Odessa as a red line for Putin. But will they defend it with their marines if Wagner and company cross in red? A terrible dilemma: either we are facing the first chapter of the third world war, or the victory of a new jungle order that arrives with chariots of fire and music by Wagner is approaching.