Ukrainians are not fighting only for their country or for their children's tomorrow. They don't even fight for democracy. If that were the case, if they were fighting for an ideal, for a historical or spiritual reason, they would have long ago laid down their arms and sought an armistice. If they have been fighting a formidable enemy for a year, it is simply to continue being themselves. If they resist and risk their lives, it is to be what they are. There is no greater motivation.
War is irrational and emotional because it celebrates death and, faced with this primitivism, there is no valid analysis.
No one knows when or how it will end. It is impossible to predict, for example, whether Putin will be executed like Mussolini or ascend to heaven as Peter the Great's heir.
What sense does it have, besides, to know? During this year of war we have seen enough to understand that the world does not much care how Putin ends up. To Europe and the United States either. It is enough for them to know that he will be defeated on the battlefield and contained within his borders.
But Putin does care about how he will die, whether or not there will be funeral parades in his honor, whether Russia will be filled with statues to preserve his memory. He cares because he, too, fights to be who he is.
Raised in these existential terms, war seems eternal. It can only end with the unconditional capitulation of one of the sides. Putin is obsessed with subduing the Ukrainians and the Ukrainians with preventing it. They don't want to be part of the new Russian empire and Putin wants nothing more than to return to Russia all the land he believes he owns.
Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine without consulting his most capable advisers. He made the decision with a handful of loyalists saying yes to everything. People from the FSB, the former KGB, told him that they had bribed the top Ukrainian military commanders not to put up any resistance. However, when it was not so and when he checked the sorry state of his army, he did not rectify. He sees himself as an infallible messiah and always a winner.
The war is a personal matter for Putin. No one but him needed her.
Russia did not need it to overcome the economic, social and demographic problems that punish its population so much. The extractive economy has no long-term future. The wealth of the subsoil will not be enough to sustain a petty bourgeois middle class. Inequality is imposed, as in the whole world, and the Russians ignore the requests of the orthodox clergy who ask for more children.
Wealth gives meaning to life and poverty takes it away. For this reason, inequality encourages wars and revolutions. That is why the children of the poorest families in Russia are now going to the front, to defend an imperial delusion. They do not fight to be themselves, but for a salary and because they are obliged. The political, military and religious authorities mobilize them with a language very similar to that of Nazism, Jihadism and any radical nationalism. Putin tells them that "life is not worth living if you do not live for what is worth dying for." They are chosen by God to defend national purity, the superiority of the Russian race and the Orthodox Church, the traditional values of the homeland against the decadence of the West. More than half a million men have fled abroad to avoid having to, to avoid ending up like the tens of thousands of their compatriots who have lost their lives or been wounded in combat.
Wars dilute men, even those who fight to be themselves, but they reaffirm nations. China and the United States, for example, but also India and Brazil, Indonesia and Turkey, sharpen their profiles at the cost of barbarism. Putin's madness has hastened the rise of a new multipolar order. There is much to gain for emerging nations that barely counted because they were neither liberal nor Western.
The United States helps Ukraine so as not to lose hegemony and the European Union is following behind. Europeans and Americans, however, lack the legitimacy to convince. They should do it with China, India and Brazil, but they can't. Another story prevails.
Western banks and energy companies also need one to explain that it is legal to get rich thanks to Putin's delusion and Ukraine's resistance. But it escapes no one since capitalism does not believe in man, but in the consumer. This, too, has been confirmed by the year of war.
The price of victory is huge for Ukrainians who are fighting and dying to be themselves. They pay without thinking about the profits that large corporations and great powers obtain with their sacrifice, and it is in this disinterest that the greatness and tragedy of the human spirit also resides.
