Wars do not have calendars or roadmaps. Once hostilities have broken out, forecasts are useless. During the Great War, the German General Staff had prepared the menu for the troops until the day the Kaiser's armies arrived in Paris. No one had suspected that more than ten million Europeans would die in the trenches nor that Germany would be humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles, which would incubate the other great world war that once again destroyed Europe.
We are approaching the third month of war in Ukraine and unforeseen events happen almost daily. The first surprise has been the resistance capacity of the Ukrainians with President Zelensky at the head. It is difficult to have a certain idea of what has happened until today because the propaganda of the two sides is self-serving and biased. The dead must be counted in the tens of thousands and the economic consequences of the war have a global effect on prices, trade and the supply of food. The fact that India has banned grain exports is one of many signs of a global crisis.
Yes, it can be affirmed that those who began to destroy towns and cities were the Russian armies that are retreating from conquered positions. Nor did anyone expect that more than one Western leader has risked stating that this war can be won by Ukraine. I don't know how, but whatever happens, Putin has lost it even if he came to control the entire Ukrainian territory. He is a disproportionate and criminal aggressor.
If it was a question of preventing Ukraine from joining NATO and moving away from Europe, the opposite has happened. The Atlantic Alliance was languishing and two neutral countries such as Sweden and Finland, with social democratic governments, have applied to join because they feel threatened by Putin and not because they intend to attack Russia. Finland has been neutral since the last war and the Swedes since the Napoleonic wars. Government and opposition in both countries have decided to abandon neutrality with the risks involved in adding more than 1,300 kilometers of border between NATO territory and Russia.
Nor was it on the agenda for Europe to park its endless internal debates to unanimously turn to Ukraine with the delivery of weapons, consumer goods and welcoming more than five million fleeing the destruction caused by Russian artillery and missiles. Even Boris Johnson's Britain is on the same page with Europe and naturally with the US and Canada to save Ukraine.
The political, social and human cost of what is happening is unpredictable. It has posed a much more dangerous crisis than the pandemic because there are no vaccines against war to cure the hatred of those who want to resolve conflicts through weapons and the destruction of the adversary.
Against those who maintain that the West should not get closer to Russia because it feels threatened by democracies that are endowed with a defensive system, I propose the reflection that I have been thinking about for weeks: are the Warsaw Pact countries better off within the EU and the NATO than under the authoritarian control of the Kremlin for more than half a century? Putin may have attacked out of fear, but the West is also defending itself out of fear that Russia will erase borders to rebuild an unlikely empire. Freedom has never come from the East.
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