Ukraine: the stalemate between Europe and Russia

(To Giampiero Venturi)
27/04/16

Spring returns to the Donbass, but the clear is still far away. Perhaps even farther than a year ago, when Minsk's approach, despite the general skepticism, had opened a window.

Disappeared from the news, Ukraine meanwhile continues to live, indeed to die. The logic of the stall prevails or better of the status quo, which configures the line of contact between Kiev Armed Forces and Donbass separatists as a concrete separation between two lands, two homelands, two spheres of influence.

The violation continues on both sides of a ceasefire that is good for Western consciences, says it all. In a country no longer united and now fallen into the economic and social abyss, the distances between the parties increase every day.

The Russian counter-sanctions are starting to generate the first billion dollars in damages to the coffers of Kiev while lands now separated from Ukraine like the Crimea (new Russian federal subject since March of the 2014) move away from the West also under the banking profile: the UnionPay payment system has replaced the Visa and Mastercard circuits.

As the silence moves away rather than pull over, Victor Levytskyy, director of theUISGDA, the Ukrainian Institute of Strategies and Global Development, speaking at Montecitorio at the conference Ukraine: crossroads between the West and Russia (attended, among others, by the President of the Foreign Commission Cicchitto and by Undersecretary Della Vedova).

“After a year we still talk about the same things as the first day. Every minute that passes the territories of the Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk are moving further and further away from Kiev and people continue to die ... "

The fear of a war frozen well beyond the cold of the latitudes becomes a scarecrow, now almost certainty. To ask oneself about the reasons, comes by itself.

Let's start from the fixed points.

The centrality of the intangibility of international borders is the pivot around which the western vision of the crisis revolves, for whose solution it is necessary to restore the territorial conditions prior to the war. The Italian government itself, although absent from the tables that count, is also perfectly aligned on this point in Brussels and Washington.

The self-determination of peoples thus becomes a subordinate principle to international law, according to an essentially practical approach: in the world not everything and everyone can aspire to independence, on pain of global chaos. Especially if the aspirations pass through violence. 

According to this view, the Crimea for example, regardless of its historical, cultural and linguistic reasons, is an integral part of Ukraine, as are the territories of the Donbass, self-proclaimed as New Russia.

The same logic has had no weight in Kosovo, where, with the 2008 referendum, we have instead seen the opposite: the principle of self-determination of peoples has prevailed over the intangibility of international borders. Today almost all the countries that apply the sanctions to Moscow for its support for the Donbass separatists recognize the independence of Pristina and with it they maintain diplomatic relations, even if officially Belgrade has never recognized the split. Italy, even to say it, is among these. Even in this case the violence was the companion of political claims and great external brothers, but the KLA supporters were never subject to international sanctions.

The different yardstick is established on the basis of the "determination of the aggressor", a principle according to which an attempt is made to resolve a crisis by establishing a priori who created it. In essence, the play of the Elementary Schools is repeated, when it was up to the head of the class to distinguish on the board the good from the bad.

This is the heritage inspired by Paul Mass, Director of Center for American Studies spoke at the same conference in the Chamber

"In Ukraine it must be clear, there is an attacker and an aggressor ..."

Orphans of his lucidity on this issue, we just look at the calendar, for many stopped at the 1991, when with the implosion of the USSR and the end of the Cold War many naive were expecting a geopolitical earthquake with an annex refresh of the balances valid for the 20th century.

But one wonders if cosmic certainties and agendas without dates are the adequate basis for an international observatory, on paper intent on resolving the greatest crisis of the East since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. One wonders if forgetting the evolutions of the last quarter of a century really helps to understand everyone's needs: Ukrainians looking to the west and those looking to the east. Above all, one wonders if this is the true ultimate goal.

In reality, small insignificant details speak more than the silence that surrounds them:

  • the Atlantic Alliance with three enlargements and in just 10 years encompassed the former Warsaw Pact and three former Soviet Republics en bloc
  • Maidan means "square" and Maidan Square it's just a mistake, like so many in Ukraine.

If to forget these small passages I am a President of a Foreign Commission and an Undersecretary, then there is still a long way to go. At least not to continue to cloud the viewfinder with which to frame a land where a multitude of European citizens die every day.

(Photo: Giorgio Bianchi)