Ukraine: absurdity and tragedy

Henry Kissinger, the very draconian former US national security adviser, Nixon’s shadowy secretary, surreal Nobel Peace Prize laureate and instigator of the Southern Cone coups, had said seven years ago, when NATO was beginning to draw closer dangerously to Eastern Europe, that Ukraine should not join the organization due to the catastrophic effects that this movement could have on the continent. He said it himself who knew the bowels of the geopolitical interests of a superior power and who was never shy about the most challenging actions of power while they could prove it. But there they are, mired in the dust of destruction and disoriented by the unpredictable advance of the war, the officials, generals and politicians who took it as common grace to speed up the process of annexation of a region that was always on the verge of rumbling under the recklessness of the other paradigmatic and mental hemisphere that has insisted on its unipolar version through influence.

Joe Biden has had no choice but to escalate the language of war in the face of the resurgence of the absorbing events of a conflict, and he has had to react clumsily by sending more weapons and more gunpowder to the fire, now that he has no other option other than progressive involvement. But his dramatic position in history and the humanitarian catastrophe in Ukraine could have been avoided if NATO had understood from its high-ranking military leadership that Ukraine’s neutral position was a necessity for world security. They knew it from the very time that Angela Merkel, the same one who could now have been the containment mast of the disaster due to her deep knowledge of Russian culture from her experiences in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), suggested, paradoxically, that the NATO had to speed up its annexation processes with the country in question. Merkel, like Biden, knew very well the unpredictable dimensions of Putin on an ultra-powerful and overwhelmed power. Since his investiture in 1999, he had shown his pathological intention to recover the importance of the lost Russian empire and the territories that the USSR ceased to dominate since the collapse, and above all the features of danger, as well as his extreme paranoia in the face of the Organization of the North Atlantic Treaty, which was created after World War II to stop Soviet influence on all fronts. That is why it is absurd and tragic that Putin’s unconditional request to declare an end to violence is the neutral recognition of Ukraine and that the West is considering it as a viable option amid despair. That was the decision that they had to take many years before a sinister escalation that they allowed to inflate until the cataclysm of 4 million refugees, until today, with no further limits foreseen in the urgency of a drama with collateral effects in an economy that is also collapsing along with to the alternate figures of a globalization, which depends on the serenity or the nervousness of all the stock markets in the world. The negotiating table in Istanbul seems to reveal small agreements among the dark, but the sporadic poisoning of delegates, the boycott of radicals and the Kremlin’s thuggish obsession with the public kneeling of Zelenzki does not seem to bode well for the proximity of the end of the catastrophe. . NATO and the sanctioning governments do not seem willing to grant more than what they should have granted in times of tense calm.

They cannot say then that this conflict in the arteries of Europe is the sole and exclusive responsibility of Putin, the criminal who stands out in the spotlight for the obviousness of his attacks on a sovereign country. The West has played with all fires and ignored all signs of danger, wreaking havoc on historical swamps without nerves, without humanism, and without prudence.