By Costas Raptis
The new Cold War is no longer a scenario, a trend or a worrying possibility. It was officially proclaimed on February 21, 2022 by Russian President Vladimir Putin in a well-televised ceremony: a public meeting of the National Security Council of Russia, a telephone conversation between the Kremlin leader Emanuel Macron and Olaf Soltz. of the self-proclaimed “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Lugansk, which seceded from Ukraine in 2014, as well as the immediate co-signing of a defense assistance agreement between the two entities and the Russian Federation.
The parameters of the Ukrainian problem are being overturned. The Minsk agreement, which was guaranteed by Russia, France and Germany and provided for the return of the “People’s Republics” to Ukrainian jurisdiction with guarantees of autonomy and amnesty, is annulled – and with it all the diplomatic processes that until the last, with Macron and Putin on Sunday telephoned a possible solution to the crisis, a deliberate gesture of contempt for European leaders and the West as a whole.
(Of course, “never say never” also applies, as the previous one of the proclamation of the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” by Ankara in 1983 reminds us, a fact that has not prevented diplomatic talks since then on the reunification of the island).
In a landscape where the confrontation has hitherto been primarily rhetorical, Putin is making the “move into action.” rather, it moves away with the recognition of the “People’s Republics”. In fact, two months after the US and NATO submitted the two Russian international treaty plans to create a new security architecture in Europe, Russia is moving forward with the creation, judging that any further dialogue is paralyzing.
This is a way for Putin to persuade that he is not bluffing and to challenge his opponents to “show their cards.” Russia – and to bear the cost on their own side, making their own passage from words to deeds.
But this is also an indirect admission of a certain defeat: that is, that Moscow has not found real interlocutors in terms of the security guarantees it claims and that it is not investing in any favorable predispositions of any part of Ukrainian or European public opinion, which is certainly now in shock.
Hence, with a view primarily to the domestic audience, Putin’s extensive sigh, embellished with a multitude of sighs, was a review of the entire history of the ethnic issue in the former Soviet Union, as well as a full-fledged decriminalization of Ukrainian statehood.
According to the Russian leader, Ukraine has been an artificial construct of Bolshevik policy and therefore, he added threateningly, Kiev should bring to its sensible limits the policy of “de-communistization” which it likes.
Ukraine, he continued, is an entity that has been eroded by corruption and plunged into the deindustrialisation, poverty and neglect of its own people, handed over to alternating groups of oligarchs (once elected to power and “pro-Russians”), the who overthrew the democracy and sovereignty of the country, turning it into something more than a western protectorate, a colony.
Somewhere in the middle of these allegations, two secondary but notable warnings were inserted: that Russia was going to locate, arrest and prosecute the perpetrators of the May 2014 burning of the Trade Union Building in Odessa, where they died. dozens of people, but also that Russia has documents on the ecclesiastical aspect of the Ukrainian crisis.
According to Putin, therefore, the game is just beginning. And the ball is on the West side right now.
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Source: Capital
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