Next February 24, in nothing, marks one year from the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And for now there is no end in sight. Neither in the short nor in the medium term. The war, however, has already seen it all: Russia’s advance, Ukraine’s counteroffensive, victims and more victims, today paralysis and trenches.
And so the doubt: after months in which the Russian position and that of Vladimir Putin seemed somewhat weak, after Christmas, after the thrust of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, does it end up entrenched? Are the internal problems that he could suffer in Russia far away?
Three of the European voices that know the most about the moment that Moscow is experiencing answered.
The war in Ukraine, seen as a turning point in international relations, drops concepts into the debate that also speak of its historical stature. It is explained among the experts that the Russian general Valeri Guerasimov, unlike classics such as Carl von Clausewitz, “does not consider war as the continuation of politics by other means: politics must ensure, on the contrary, the solution of military problems in the era of the hybrid war of the 21st century”, concludes Roberto Rossi, professor at the University of Rome La Sapienza.
(In its essence, its doctrine is based on the strict centralization of the management of all military, economic and political-diplomatic resources. In turn, it implies that the conflict should not be frozen but move towards an even more acute offensive phase followed by decisions political and diplomatic based on a position of strength.)
History, in fact, runs through each analysis of one and the other of the war.
Lavrov accused NATO of being comparable to Napoleon and Hitler, because they are aimed at definitively resolving the Russian question, favoring the economic and political collapse of the Russian civilization-state.
Zelensky, for his part, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos last January, urged the West to send military and economic aid and cast doubt on Putin’s existence. (At the height of the counteroffensive, there was even speculation that Putin “might not make it to Christmas.” Is the Russian president a virtual reality, could he be dead, and could power management in Russia be in the hands of a hidden and unidentifiable circle? lance.
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, another classic of the Cold War era, has also pointed out that for a country traversed over the centuries by foreign armies from both East and West, security always you will need both a geopolitical and a legal foundation; when its security border shifts a thousand miles east from the Elbe River towards Moscow, Russia’s perception of the world order will always have an inevitably strategic component.
Thus, it is insisted that the conflict will have long-term repercussions. Others summarize it in that, “when the war ends, the world will no longer be the same.”
