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Russian President Vladimir Putin has pointed out where the gorge lies in what in 1959, a few years before the Cuban missile crisis, the philosopher Bertrand Russell called the chicken game in the nuclear race between the USSR. and NATO; the place where catastrophe could begin if neither contender gives in and stops the car in its suicidal rush forward. This point of no return for the Russian president is Ukraine, the former Soviet republic with which the Atlantic Alliance flirts and which since 2014 has suffered a war that has already claimed some 14,000 lives.
“Our diplomacy has a top priority task: to obtain strong, reliable and long-term guarantees for our security. In dialoguing with the United States and its allies, we will insist on reaching specific agreements that exclude any future NATO movement to the east, ”Putin warned this Wednesday at the reception in the Kremlin of the new ambassadors, including that of Spain, the diplomat Marcos Gómez.
From the Russian perspective, the conflict is twofold. On the one hand, the direct threat of a hypothetical deployment of US missiles so close to Moscow. And on the other, not giving in to the Donbas, a powder keg that could drag the two sides into a greater war. In both cases Ukraine is the protagonist, a sovereign country that the Kremlin considers to be under its sphere of influence.
Putin advocates starting “substantial negotiations” with NATO to prevent its extension to the east and taking into account “the interests of Russia and all Euro-Atlantic states.” The first step will be taken this Thursday by the Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, and his US counterpart, Antony Blinken, at the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) meeting in Stockholm, where they will hold a meeting on the sidelines to address the crisis unleashed around Ukraine.
Putin himself already delimited his red lines on Tuesday: “Look at what has happened in the last 20 years or more. Despite our warnings, its infrastructure reached our borders. Anti-missile systems are already deployed in Poland and Romania, there are MK-41 launchers there, they can be equipped with Tomahawks and other attack systems. This creates a threat against us, “added the president before setting his limit. “If new missile complexes appear on Ukrainian territory, their flight time to Moscow will be seven to ten minutes, and in the case of the deployment of hypersonic weapons, five,” Putin warned.
The Kremlin has always pointed as the root of its confrontation with Washington to the deployment in Europe of the anti-missile shield promoted by the George W. Bush Administration from 2000, as well as to the location on land of Aegis maritime batteries, since these were circumventing the Treaty Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF). “Given this, we were forced to develop hypersonic weapons, this was our response,” Putin reiterated in reference to his announcement in March 2018 of a new generation of missiles that can evade any countermeasure. As if that were not enough, the crisis worsened in August 2019, when Washington withdrew from the INF pact after accusing Moscow of having developed another cruise missile that exceeded the maximum allowed range of 500 kilometers.
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However, the Russian version is another. The Foreign Ministry replied this week to a NATO article on “myths” in its relations, saying that Washington, “with the tacit consent of its allies, has constantly destroyed international legal mechanisms. The most striking example is the INF treaty crisis. Two weeks after abandoning it, it tested a missile that would have been prohibited by the agreement. In addition, it did so from the ground version of the Mk-41 ″ launcher.
Moscow also denounces that “all NATO’s collective defense is concentrated on its eastern flank.” “It seems that the Alliance does not have other problems, such as terrorism or threats from other regions,” he adds.
In response, Minister Lavrov has picked up the gauntlet of Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko to deploy Russian nuclear missiles on his territory. “I would take this statement as a very serious warning to the foolish policies of the West,” stressed the man who has led Russian diplomacy for 17 years, days after NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that weapons Nuclear power plants from the Atlantic Alliance could be moved further east if Germany denies that they are deployed on its territory.
Frozen conflict
The nuclear scene is also joined by an entrenched conflict that for some Russian analysts recalls the Serbian case in the First World War. It is about the Donbas, latent since April 2014, when Russian paramilitaries stormed with the support of businessmen close to the Kremlin to rekindle the protests against Kiev, as many of those ex-combatants have recognized. This low-intensity conflict led to an open war in which several Russian armored and motorized brigades intervened to prevent the collapse of the secessionists in the face of the advance of the Ukrainian Army.
After more than seven years of conflict and after half a million Russian passports have been issued to the population, the Kremlin still does not recognize those territories, as it did with Crimea: “There is still no such recognition, they are self-proclaimed republics, although their solution is delayed and we are heading towards a dead end ”, declared Putin’s spokesman.
The Russian Government, which has mobilized some 114,000 soldiers around Ukraine, assures that this responds to the movements of Kiev to supposedly retake its ground, something that the Ukrainian Government denies. According to the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, María Zajárova, on Wednesday, Kiev has sent around half of its 250,000 soldiers to the Donbas line of contact.
However, Russian analysts rule out a new military operation at Putin’s initiative. “I don’t think there is a real war. Russia does not need it and it can only happen under the “Georgian scenario” of 2008, that is, if the Ukrainians decide that NATO will help them, ”says Aleksandr Borisov, professor at the International Institute of Foreign Relations in Moscow. That year, the then Georgian president, Mikhail Saakhasvili, launched an operation in South Ossetia after several skirmishes that was crushed by the Russian army.
Regarding the negotiations entrenched by the Donbas, the analyst accuses Kiev of this. “The Minsk format [las negociaciones de paz celebradas en la capital bielorrusa] failed because of Ukraine, which wants to review the 2015 agreements, forgetting about the principle “agreements are to be kept“(The agreed obligation, in Latin)”, adds Borisov, who believes that the West does not understand Russia: “They do not take into account that the memory in Russia of the Great Patriotic War [como se conoce en Rusia a la Segunda Guerra Mundial] It not only includes respect for the immortal feat of the victors, but also the lessons learned from Stalin’s mistakes before the war and a firm determination to prevent such a thing, even if it is necessary to use extreme means such as nuclear weapons in the face of aggressions. and the threat to the existence of Russia ”.
According to some people think tanks Russians, this crisis benefits the US to weaken the European Union and Russia. “The Anglo-Saxons would like to set fire to Europe, while remaining on the sidelines and concentrating on China,” says Borisov, an opinion shared in an article published in the official magazine of the Russian Foreign Ministry by journalist Bogdán Bezpalko: “The important thing for the US it is provoking Russia and interrupting the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline; for the United Kingdom, weaken Germany and the European Union; and for the rest of the countries, simply participate in the collective containment of Russia “
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