By Professor Silverio Allocca (DIPLOMATICINFO GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST)
A somewhat puzzled Zelensky: but hindsight is full of pits.
As is well known, the expression ‘flatus vocis’, traditionally attributed to the philosopher Roscellino of Compiègne (died around 1120), the greatest representative of the so-called medieval nominalism, stands for the idea, by no means without foundation, that universal concepts have no objective reality and are only simple names (i.e., precisely, flatus vocis).
In common parlance this expression is usually referred in a rightly and dutifully polemical sense to speeches lacking in substance or to promises that have no follow-through, valence and consistency so that here it not by chance finds its full place with reference to the repeated utterances of the U.S. President, the Italian Prime Minister as well as the ubiquitous President of the European Commission concerning the Russian-Ukrainian conflict: the bloody heterodirected farce that the three mentioned characters, undeservedly protagonists of recent world politics, have contributed -and still contribute- to have been dramatically going on for more than two years now, bragging about the defense of undefined and undefinable alleged Western ‘values’ to which no one actually gives credence.
In this sense the cloying and exceedingly ludicrous script has been repeatedly favorably reviewed by a Western press (predominantly European, the U.S. press being usually of quite a different caliber) which, with the usual laudable exceptions, has made servility its banner well beyond any acceptable time limit going so far as to exceed by far the tolerable heights of ridicule and decency when it refrained from commenting on the facts on no less than four to say the least striking relatively recent occasions that are worth recalling here to understand what I believe was the well-calibrated strategic move of a Macron who would have ended the war in Ukraine, had it been up to him, long ago with alle due respect to Washington:
1) the first occasion in chronological order dates back to July 11 and 12, 2023, that is, to the days of the NATO Heads of State and Government Summit, which saw President Biden speak out decisively against any direct military intervention by the United States and NATO itself in the Ukrainian conflict. Corollary to this came the stances of the governments of the main European countries, among which we find France, Germany, Italy itself and so on, also regarding Kyiv’s entry into NATO: a certain entry, but when the war is over … obviously if won, therefore possibly “in due course.”
2) the second was all the prerogative of Premier Giorgia Meloni who, as reported by ANSA on Feb. 24, 2024, signed on behalf of Italy a bilateral security cooperation agreement with Ukraine.” As stated by President Volodymyr Zelenskyj on X “This document establishes a solid basis for the long-term security partnership of our countries. We also discussed further support for Ukraine in the context of Italy’s presidency of the G7. I am grateful to Italy for supporting Ukraine.” All very interesting, but in fact doing anything other than issuing propagandistic statements, that is, granting cloying self-congratulatory interviews and being immortalized photographically with a perpetual smile on her face, no one has bothered, and Giorgia Meloni has been very careful not to distinguish herself since, moreover, to speak of a concrete commitment, pursuant to the signed agreement, it will be necessary to wait for the outbreak of the next conflict: laughter lest we cry in this case is a must.
3) the third episode is all Ursula von der Leyen and starts from an official statement she made on February 28, 2024, which verbatim reads, “We do not have the luxury of being quiet. (…) With or without the support of our partners, we cannot allow Russia to win!” It would be interesting to understand with whom President von der Leyen intended to proceed when she said “With or without the support of our partners” given that after the choral “no!” to the hypothesis of a Western troop presence in Ukraine evoked by Macron (to say no! incidentally, had been the U.S., EU, NATO, Britain, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Italy) on balance the President found herself in the very unpleasant position of being able to count, to deploy it on the battlefield, at most the army composed of the – I hope so for her- vast ranks of the friends with whom she usually has lunch or enjoys an aperitif. War should be a serious matter that should never be taken lightly in order to make some useless proclamation:… it should! To summarize: the question that arises cannot help but concern whether President von der Leyen has by any chance taken into consideration the mass of Western companies that are still active in Russia and that, in the case of the transformation of Russian assets frozen in the West into money to be lavished on Zelensky to turn them into armaments, would be subject to predictable retaliatory measures that would result in immense losses in terms of capital for the parent companies based here, losses that would result in quite a few employment – and other – setbacks that no one here has, I think, any need for.
4) the fourth dates back, albeit with dubious wording, to March 8, 2024 and concerns an interception by Russian government broadcaster Rt (formerly Russia Today) of a confidential conversation lasting 38 minutes (the full transcript of which has been published in an article titled “Transcript of a conversation between high-ranking Bundeswehr officers dated 02/19/2024” edited by Margarita Simonyan) dating back to Feb. 19, 2024 between German Air Force chief Ingo Gerhartz and a number of associates concerning the possible delivery of long-range Taurus missiles to Ukraine. During the conversation, senior German officials claimed to have analyzed in detail the Kerch Bridge-the one connecting Russia and Crimea-and estimated that it would take up to 20 missiles to bring it down.
The more interesting news, however, would be another in that in the course of the conversation mention would be made of the presence in Ukraine of British, U.S., and French soldiers: a presence, officially denied by London, Washington, and Paris, necessary to support the Kyiv armed forces in the use of Western weapons systems among which should make a fine showing are the mentioned missiles that Chancellor Olaf Scholz has repeatedly stated that he does not want to put in the hands of the Ukrainian military despite pressure from several Western European capitals and numerous members of his own coalition. Among the many official comments regarding the intercept certainly stands out the one made by the Chief of the German Army Staff, Gen. Carsten Breuer, who thought to emphasize that the whole thing is a consequence of the fact that Germany’s turnaround would pass, even before a mere budgetary issue, through a change in the mentality of the personnel: a thesis, to tell the truth, hardly tenable given the rank of those involved and, if I may say so, my personal experience when I found myself staying for work purposes in military facilities, in Italy and abroad also of the Bundeswehr, which I found particularly sensitive on issues concerning security in all respects. To think that senior German officials communicated with each other, moreover in this day and age, using, out of trivial cluelessness, a normed civilian platform (specifically the American WebEx), which as such is easily intercepted, as well as that one of the participants even followed the meeting from a hotel room in Singapore with his cell phone is nothing short of incredible.
This seems all the more suspicious since, according to the results of a recent poll conducted by ARD Deutschlandtrend, the results of which were released on March 7, 2024, as many as 70 percent of German citizens fear that espionage operations will increase and 67 percent say they are concerned about the lack of preparedness of the federal apparatus: how such awareness in the civilian sphere can be reconciled with the allegedly invoked lack of awareness in the military sphere is beyond comprehension, not least in light of the fact that the daily interception attempts and infornatic attacks put in place by the military intelligence services of all major powers-and not only-are now a universally known fact. However much someone, the U.S., wanted to pass off this alleged leak (the veracity of which, or at least the suspicion of whose veracity, -possibly incidentally- would have been implicitly confirmed, even in the absence of official assent, by the German Chief of Staff’s own reprimand) as part of some sort of Russian sham aimed at raising the idea of the West’s weakness among European citizens (an assumption that is entirely laughable when reading the text of the conversation), it is safe to suspect that the same alleged leak is being fostered and is part of a skillful attempt by Germany to avoid, beyond talk, getting further involved in dialogues and a fortiori in NATO’s eventual planning and actions. This is all the more so because of the fact that the -until now always alleged- leak had already been taken care of by the German Chancellor himself on March 3, 2024 which speaks in favor of the legitimate suspicions alleged here. .
Be that as it may, the most disconcerting aspect of the whole tragicomic affair is the blatant power vacuum that the whole thing testifies to and which it is safe to assume, as we shall see, was behind French President Macron’s boutade in his poker game with Washington since everything seems to have happened without the knowledge of Chancellor Scholz as well as of the entire German government, moreover with the complicity of Defense Minister Boris Pistorius who seems to have operated so far in cahoots with top army brass loyal more to NATO than to Germany, as indeed was done by President von der Leyen and the Italian PM (as indeed was done by her predecessor, Mario Draghi). Incidentally, reading the transcript of the conversation intercepted by Moscow makes it clear that when Putin adumbrates suspicions about the real dependence of Germany’s military leadership on the Anglo-Saxon NATO powers rather than on Berlin, he is not making mere propaganda as self-styled geopolitical analysts who enjoy far too much undeserved credit often seem to adumbrate. What, however, is unknown is how welcome this condition is to Berlin since I doubt that Germany has forgotten the sabotage of Nord Stream 1&2, moreover, knowing full well to whom to send its heartfelt thanks.
Be that as it may, it was no coincidence that in recent days Russian military Telegram channels had leaked the news regarding the secret supply of the first 25 Taurus to Ukraine, vanguard of much larger batches to be embarked on a dozen Sukhoi Su-24M aircraft (of unknown origin) being upgraded in Poland precisely to embark such ordnance. Indiscretions added how the secret supply to Kiev had been agreed upon with Washington and would later be leaked to the U.S. media so that, evidently, they would tell the Europeans about it (perhaps because of the knowledge that the Old World press is notable these days for a lack of transparency that is nothing short of shameful). In this sense, the attempt to minimize the leak put in place by Minister Pistorius with U.S. support was beyond embarrassing especially with reference to what the U.S. authorities said on March 4, 2024, through the mouthpiece of White House National Security Council Spokesman John Kirby, while (mind you) the USD 60Bn U.S. assistance package for Ukraine was still stuck in Congress, made the following explicit: “We are all working together to try to support Ukraine, and the Germans have been right there,” adding “Each nation has to decide for itself what to do, and the Germans have stepped up.
They came forward in a significant way” (according to Biden’s wishes). In the end, Europe, thanks to the U.S. were left holding the classic candle, and the intercepted phone call highlights more of this, because this is what is clear from John Kirby’s statements. Meanwhile, Pistorius said that normal preliminary disciplinary proceedings are under way, but that serious personal consequences are unlikely: “I will not sacrifice any of my best officers to Putin’s games, to put it very clearly,” those were his words, as if the whole thing was just a trivial mischief of very little consequence. Words that seem rather strange in light of the fact that the Luftwaffe leadership revealed, among other things, not only the presence in Ukraine of French and British military personnel for the use of SCALP/Storm Shadow missiles but also sensitive information such as the Ukrainians’ shortage of air defense missiles, including Patriots.
And we come to the centerpiece of the whole affair, the second in truth after the cited article in the prestigious Financia Times: the statement by Macron that he is in favor of sending troops to the Ukrainian front. On closer inspection, a hypothesis that I believe was put forward more to provoke a coming out of the closet of the most active chatterers in the European public squares because, at this point, both Ukraine and the people of Europe must finally be put in a position to understand what game they are playing-each for their own interests and certainly not for those of the Ukrainians or even their own administrators-Britain the United States, the European Commission led by Ursula von der Leyen, Italian PM Giorgia Meloni and President Zelensky himself who appears beyond being the crock pot among too many iron pots while China remains watching intently as someone, sooner or later, Ukraine will have to rebuild it and with it the New Silk Road: That that alternative for the Red Sea favors India and Saudi Arabia a bit too much.
In other words, in the light of the facts -and until proven otherwise- it seems exceedingly legitimate to assume, given also the repeated past attempts made by the Elysée Palace precisely through the mouth of Macron himself to make Europeans reason as Europeans and not as vassals ( but what I say “vassals”, better to speak of “valvassins”) possibilists to Washington’s “let’s arm and match,” that its pronouncement was a clever bluff in this exhausting poker game played by the Anglo-Americans (with a decidedly rigged deck of cards) on the backs of the Europeans and on the skin of the Ukrainians.
Confirmations to such an interpretation, as well as of the expected failure of any attempt to support Ukraine as well as of the concrete impossibility for the West to make Kyiv achieve the vaunted military victory, also come implicitly from other statements such as that of French Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu, who on Feb. 27, 2024, reiterated that “it is out of the question to wage war on Russia” by announcing that Paris will manage to supply Ukraine with about 3.000 artillery shells, equal to the need for about half a day’s fire of Ukrainian troops: a piece of news that needs no comment.
Not to mention what was stated by Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourné who stressed that the presence of Western troops in Ukraine would not lead to a crossing of the “belligerence threshold” in the conflict against Russia if limited to certain operations, such as those concerning demining or cyber defense.
So while Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kuleba in an interview with the Newspaper says “It is important for everyone in Europe to accept the evidence that the war is now inside Europe, not on its periphery,” and then concludes in almost apocalyptic tones that “In Europe the Era of Peace is over. Europe must prepare to fight. And European countries are not” (except then, to save himself in the corner, explaining that what Macron meant to do with his words was more to formulate a call to “stop doing training missions outside the borders, but to do them in Ukraine”), in Germany, as the Institute of International Affairs pointed out in its newsletter, “German intelligence has delivered to Chancellor Scholz’s desk a meaty dossier on the consequences of a sudden U.S. exit from NATO,” adding that this means we should “get used to pondering the unthinkable but, above all, to acting quickly and effectively,” even if, on closer inspection, the only possible imponderable to be accepted is defeat in order to avoid total defeat.
On the other hand, Macron does not seem to be the only one playing cat-and-mouse with the United States since during the conversation between senior German officials intercepted by Moscow there appears, at one point, an interesting reference to the actual significance of the supply of the Tauros which, according to the General’s stasi, would in fact be a mere palliative strategically completely devoid of any concrete and significant usefulness .
