Putin’s war, which was supposed to last days or weeks, is celebrating its fourth anniversary. It is a social catastrophe for , a historical disaster for , a testament to Europe’s geopolitical weakness and a verdict on Trump.
Ukraine had 46 million inhabitants in February 2022. Today, it has around 10 million fewer, including refugees abroad, war dead and inhabitants of areas under occupation. It becomes a nation of widows, while its fertility rate declines to half the minimum replacement rate.
Putin lost the war, from a strategic perspective. Russian forces proved incapable of subduing a nation several times smaller, both in demographic terms and in terms of economic or military power. In Russia, public freedoms, already narrow, have entirely evaporated.
The Russian economy resisted, but at the cost of a regressive structural mutation. It has transformed into a war economy, whose vitality rests on military spending. In the process, the would-be tsar subordinated Russia, economically and diplomatically, to China. Without Trump’s rise, Putin would have to face a genuine peace negotiation.
Russia’s GDP is roughly equivalent to Italy’s. But Europe proved incapable of facing the challenge of quickly rebuilding its war industry, in order to challenge the Russian adventure on the battlefield. Even today, after Trump’s betrayal, it is American weapons imported into Europe that provide Ukrainian military resistance.
Europeans lack leaders of sufficient stature to persuade voters that ensuring Ukraine’s sovereignty is a vital European interest. The European Union resists defining a timetable for Ukrainian entry into the bloc. The Europeans did not reach consensus even on financing Ukraine through the use, as a loan, of frozen Russian financial reserves.
Under , the US never managed to reconcile words and gestures. Support for Ukraine was declared full and unyielding. However, fearful of Russian nuclear blackmail, Washington chose to manage the war. The US spent three years providing military aid capable of avoiding defeat but insufficient to force Putin to back down from his maximalist pretensions. Famously, Biden de facto excluded the possibility of Ukraine’s admission to NATO after the end of the conflict, renouncing a trump card in future negotiations with Russia.
Trump betrayed the US commitment to Europe. The Russian invasion violated the treaties signed between Russia and Ukraine, in the wake of the implosion of the USSR, which guaranteed Ukrainian sovereignty and borders. Since 1945, Europe has not seen the annexation of territories from an independent nation. The White House, however, sees the conflict in the same way as the Kremlin: as a civil war within “Great Russia”. Trump’s alignment with Putin reintroduced the spheres of influence policy and signaled the rupture of European confidence in the geopolitical alliance with the US.
In the last year, the publicized Russian military advances in eastern Ukraine, obtained at the cost of the mass sacrifice of its soldiers, cover an area more or less equivalent to the city of Moscow. Trump’s “peace”, which is Putin’s, remains distant. Reason: the Ukrainian nation does not admit capitulation.
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