The chances of Ukraine winning the war with Russia are fading despite having stopped Putin's brutal offensive unleashed almost two years ago. There is no reliable data on the death toll, but casualties on both sides are estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. The day that the rubble of the bombings is cleaned up and the shrapnel from the battlefields is collected, the magnitude of the disaster of this first great war of attrition of the century will be seen.
Russia will be able to keep Crimea seized from Ukraine in 2014 and the militarily occupied southeastern provinces of the country for the past two years. What it will not recover is the sense of a certain Russian belonging shared with Ukrainians for centuries.
Remaining in occupied territory for a long period of time is no longer considered a victory, but an obvious failure. The United States experienced it in Afghanistan and Iraq fleeing in disgrace the same way the Marines fled Saigon in defeat by the Vietnamese half a century ago.
The war in Ukraine is a war of Russia against Europe fought in one of the most punished countries in history for being subjected to the horrible famine and mass deportations by Stalin and having been invaded and razed by Hitler. Vassili Grossman describes in Life and Destiny the human devastation perpetrated by the Nazis when they entered Ukraine in 1941. His Jewish mother was a victim of the genocide ordered by Hitler and he was able to avoid Stalinism's persecution of writers and intellectuals · Hebrew intellectuals although his great novel was confiscated by the KGB and he did not see it published in his day.
Ukraine and Poland suffered more than any other country from the barbarities of the two great totalitarianisms of the last century. The alteration of its borders to the east and west are the scars that recent history has engraved on its lands due to the warlike impulses of Germany or Russia. Insecurity in Ukraine and Poland translates into an endemic fear of what comes from outside.
Putin wrote an essay a year before the war that he would use to justify the invasion. He argued that Russians and Ukrainians were one people cruelly divided by external forces that hated Russia. It is unquestionable that the two countries coexisted for a thousand years, but what is not valid is to pretend that the separation was caused by an external plot and not by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the independence agreed with the 15 republics who broke away from the Kremlin dependency. I remember a dinner with President Yeltsin, in those frenetic times at the Finisterre restaurant in Barcelona, in which he assured that Ukraine was included in the package of independences granted.
This Soviet decomposition was described by his successor, Vladimir Putin, as the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. President Putin knows Europe and doesn't like it. What's more, he considers her a danger to his safety. Not so much for the military force, but for the values of freedom and progress that it represents. His strategy to combat the imaginary European enemy does not for now consist of invading a country that is part of NATO. Their armies have proven neither modern nor prepared.
He thought of recapturing Ukraine with a military attack, but for two years he has been bogged down on the Dnieper front without retreating but also without advancing. Russia's defense abroad through its intelligence services and infiltration of the United States and Europe dates back to Stalin's time.
It is a common belief that Putin influenced Trump's victory in 2016 and the outcome of Brexit in the same year. The affinity of European far-right parties with the Kremlin is no secret. Viktor Orbán is the only EU leader who has not broken ties with Moscow after the invasion of Ukraine.
I wrote in 2019 that Carles Puigdemont often appeared in the Russian media with sympathetic messages towards Putin and his annexation of Crimea. The Kremlin is not interested in the independence of Catalonia, but its activity to weaken Europe has been permanent. And Catalonia was a destabilizing factor for the European Union. If Ukraine is subjugated, it will be necessary to defend our borders and our life systems. A Trump victory would make it more urgent. The increase in defense budgets is inevitable.
