By Professor Silverio Allocca (DIPLOMATICINFO GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST)
As pointed out by the Hungarian president not long ago the non-re-election of Putin was one of the goals of the sanctions policy put in place by the West against Moscow, and given the result … there is little to be said.
This umpteenth failed mission means that now the situation has become even more complicated: Russia will not be defeated by Kyiv on the ground, and Putin’s recent re-election for much longer will not allow for a “softer” counterpart in the Kremlin.
To sum up, a direct military intervention by the Europeans right now would result in an escalation with an easily predictable outcome since not even the West is in a condition to carry out a successful offensive on the ground, which, moreover, would have to develop on a front of far greater proportions than at present with totally inadequate means, men and logistics.
Not to mention the motivation of Europeans to go and fight and die in a conflict that everyone talks about emphatically without, for the most part, having understood a great deal about it and, above all, without having understood what the point of actually fighting it is and for what reason everything is still being done today so that young Ukrainians continue to die.
The era of grand ideals, sci-fi parades and oceanic rallies of the 1930s is long gone: this is the era of the mostly individualistic followers of the heroes of TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and the hottest influencers, the era of an Artificial Intelligence of which most do not even know what it is, which is presented as the most advanced answer to the needs of modern living in an evolved society while avoiding pointing out that most of the current middle and low-profile occupations will be the preserve of automatons and not humans, humans who will surely be able to benefit from the creation of new job opportunities that they will be able to usefully access if -and this is where the stage falls- in possession of analytical-deductive skills of medium to high level as well as knowledge, skills and competencies that in the vast majority of cases most do not have and will never have because of both the analytical-deductive deficiencies mentioned and the degradation in which the training systems of almost all the main Western countries are in.
I honestly don’t understand how anyone could even think of setting up an army with such a mass of maneuvers mostly devoted to disquisition of solidified nothingness thinking then to motivate it to action by talking to it about the importance of the defense of undefined and definable “Western values,” which moreover it is not given to understand what they really consist of and are in themselves, if we just take a look at the low level of past election campaigns, that characterizing the present U.S. presidential campaign, that of the recent Italian election campaign, that of the, to say the least, sleazy British referendum campaign having the Brexit as its subject matter, and so on…
One must come to terms with this and understand that one does not become a warrior by putting on a multitude of mostly well-fed functional illiterates (eager at most to win the daily challenge of “likes,” whose highest aspiration is to make money and appear on social or only-fans) a uniform promising them honor, glory and, why not, perhaps, a medal of remembrance: and this all the more so if to put that uniform on them and to inflame their spirits we find the pathetic political caricatures, the magic piper strong with their cheap slogans, who daily parade before our eyes on the institutional red carpets of half the world.
Beyond all the sociological considerations there is, then, another problem that no one is talking about and which has long rightly been an issue of particular interest to President Macron: the lack of an integrated European army. One cannot but agree with the Elysée, in fact, when he somehow tries to draw attention to the fact that Europe can never be a truly sovereign competitor of international caliber as long as it is in the condition of someone who entrusts its security to someone else.
It is pointless, in this sense, to complain about the heavy interference and conditioning imposed by the United States in the affairs of the Old Continent if it is then to the United States that it has been devolving for decades, even after the end of the Cold War, the onerous task of ensuring its defense, just as it is beyond foolish to be surprised that Washington operates mainly by pursuing its own interests and not those of the EU.
With his interventionist boutade, Macron has in fact forced the European Chancelleries to take stock of the situation with regard to everything from the consistency even in numbers of the different national armies, the situation of the arsenals as well as the production capacity of the military: a healthy bath of reality.
A few numbers suffice to make the point: today Volodymyr Zelensky has about 500,000 troops, which means half of what Vladimir Putin can count on. Hence the theoretical need for support that is not limited, according to the Elysée, to the dispatch of means, but with the knowledge that France itself faces manpower shortages among its own uniforms. In this regard, it seems that French Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu, in presenting a plan for military “talent retention,” spoke of it as a problem that exists in “all democracies that have professional armies without conscription”-a problem that would have been frequently discussed in NATO meetings, so that it is not apparent what purpose the White House would have served in advocating the conclusion of bilateral collaborative security and defense agreements with Kyiv to stimulate something that at present no European country would be able to translate into effective action.
From the excellent considerations regarding specifically the case of Italy by Gen. Antonio Li Gobbi, considerations that flowed into an interesting article of March 20, 2024 titled “Macron wants to send NATO soldiers to Ukraine, but the military is getting less and less: interview with Gen. Li Gobbi,” further interesting insights emerge to frame the general situation of the Ukrainian conflict where to the question “Returning to Ukraine and European aid, Brussels would be ready to use the proceeds of Russia’s frozen assets (200 billion) to buy weapons to send to Kiev, amounting to about 3 billion euros per year. What do you think?” the Gen. more than agrees with objectivity and wisdom:
“It is an option to be carefully evaluated, it requires a legal assessment as to whether it is correct according to international law or useful in terms of international credibility: an international investor might be disincentivized by the idea of having interests frozen for issues not dependent on him personally, but on his government. Certainly the debate on how to support Ukraine is central since the situation is critical.”
Cynicism? Coldness? Anti-Westernism? I wouldn’t say so if we just take a look at what was published in the Financial Times of March 22, 2024 in a rather significant article titled “US has urged Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian oil refineries” in which it says verbatim,
“The United States has urged Ukraine to halt attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure, warning that drone strikes risk driving up global oil prices and provoking retaliation, according to three people familiar with the discussions. Washington’s repeated warnings have been delivered to senior officials of Ukraine’s state security service, the SBU, and its military intelligence directorate, known as the GUR, they told the Financial Times. Both intelligence units have steadily expanded their drone programs to strike Russian targets on land, at sea and in the air since the start of the Kremlin’s large-scale invasion in February 2022. One person said the White House has become increasingly frustrated by brazen Ukrainian drone attacks targeting oil refineries, terminals, depots and storage facilities across western Russia, damaging its oil production capacity.
Russia remains one of the world’s largest energy exporters despite Western sanctions on its oil and gas sector. Oil prices have risen about 15 percent this year to $85 a barrel, driving up fuel costs just as U.S. President Joe Biden begins his re-election campaign,” and further, “Washington also fears that if Ukraine continues to strike Russian facilities, including those hundreds of miles from the border, Russia could retaliate by striking at energy infrastructure that the West relies on. These include the CPC pipeline that transports oil from Kazakhstan to the global market via Russia. Western companies, including ExxonMobil and Chevron, use the pipeline, which Moscow briefly shut down in 2022″ and then we get to the tidbit when we read ” ‘We do not encourage or enable attacks inside Russia,’ said an NSC spokesman. The CIA declined to comment. In Kiev, an SBU spokesman declined to comment. Officials in the GUR and Zelenskyy’s office did not respond to requests for comment”…one wonders if these are the “values” that young Ukrainians are dying for, for the series that there is no limit to the worst!
I was undecided for a long time about the title to give to this article since the first choice had fallen on “UKRAINE: ALL COUNTRIES’ CHATTERERS, UNITE!”, a somewhat misleading title since the chatterers to whom I intended to refer are certainly not, at least at this juncture, Dean Macron and his aides but President Biden, Premier Giorgia Meloni, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and all those who in various capacities for more than two years have been embracing the beyond ridiculous as pro tempore, expressions regarding the unconditional, in truth conditional, sine die support for President Volodymyr Zelenskyj’s Ukraine or, even worse, in the guise of a watchword the well-known “Putin must not win!” but without specifying for whose benefit: because if we take due account of the aforementioned article from the Financial Times in the end it matters little who wins because we are always the losers.
In the meantime to back up such squalor we also find the issue of corruption, which apparently continues to be at home in Ukraine, where it really seems to be making a very modest show of the alleged Western ‘values’ that to most, beginning with the young Ukrainians sent to the front, were and still are given to understand were the primary reason for the dutiful support given by the West to Kyiv’s holy war against Moscow.
On January 28, 2024, the New York Times published an article entitled “Ukraine Accuses Defense Company of Embezzling $40 Million” in which verbatim the following can be read:
“Ukraine’s intelligence agency said it had exposed a defense company’s $40 million embezzlement scheme, money that had been intended to procure mortar rounds, as the government sought to underline its commitment to fighting corruption at a time when U.S. military aid has stalled. Officials at the defense company, Lviv Arsenal, attempted to siphon off 1.5 billion Ukrainian hryvnias, or $40 million, from the state budget that had been designated for the purchase of 100,000 mortar rounds, said the intelligence agency, the Security Service of Ukraine. The Defense Ministry cooperated in the investigation, which implicated some of its current and former senior officials, the intelligence agency, known as S.B.U., said in a statement.
The company got the contract and funds for the purchases in the summer of 2022, several months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “However, it never sent a single round to our country, while moving the money into the shadows,” said an S.B.U. statement posted Saturday on the Telegram social messaging app. It said that five people had been charged, but their identities were not released. It was not immediately possible to contact the company, which the Ukrainian news media said was not well-known.
The case comes as the Kyiv government tries to emphasize its focus on fighting graft.“
The issue in question is no small matter is what is most astonishing is that while the U.S. press has been very little reticent about anything related to this aspect, not so can be said the main news channels, for example, from Europe and elsewhere, have done.
Incidentally, already on September 19, 2023 -in the face of all a flourish of ‘rumors’-the New York Times, in the wake of the crackdown by Zelensky, who at the time was forced to replace all the heads of the recruiting offices as a market had apparently been established in bribes paid by conscripts to avoid being sent to the front, of the dismissal of all six deputy defense ministers following that of former Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov who was the subject of heavy embezzlement charges, the dismissal of spokeswoman Hanna Maliar, known for her constant TV statements about advances in the counteroffensive, and dulcis in fundo of the Secretary of State of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, Vashchenko-had verbatim written: “The Ukrainian leader has sought to show that his government is tightening management of the Defense Ministry, which oversees the billions of dollars in military assistance donated for the war. Some U.S. critics of the funding have said that reports of corruption have been a reason to place stricter limits on military aid, and some NATO members fear that the aid itself may end up being diverted from its intended purposes”.
Not that this is meant to argue the good right of Moscow, but rather to emphasize the need, having reached this point, to be very clear about both the reasons as well as the real objectives that move and have moved both the White House and the Kremlin for all that concerns a conflict that in fact is a mere proxy war between the United States and the Russian Federation for whose outbreak, incrustation and victims both sides will sooner or later have to take responsibility.
What is apparent at this point is that it all seems to be taking place in deference to a school of thought that attributes the Biden Administration’s insane willingness to risk it all as much to win the war in Ukraine as to win the next White House election, and in such a context it is to be hoped that the entire planet will not pay for it.
