Augusto Manzanal Ciancaglini
Political scientist
Russia invades Ukraine as a desperate way to avoid sinking into the corner of irrelevance that the United States and its allies were pushing it into by focusing on the Indo-Pacific.
To this end, it takes the risk of diplomatic isolation, economic drain and a counterproductive security strategy. All within a stronger-than-expected backlash: Ukrainian resistance and international pressure have exceeded expectations.
In short, Russia continues on the opposite path to the one it should choose in order to project itself as a regional power aspiring to become a global one. It does not diversify its economy or gather allies by spreading any kind of cultural or ideological proposition, beyond its dissemination of fake news, while giving the enemy reasons to strengthen its alliance.
Massive sanctions may affect more symbolically than economically, but confirmation that Europe’s dependence on Russian energy is not viable is underlined by Germany’s decision to halt Nord Stream 2.
On the other hand, as with Moscow’s repression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, NATO is solidifying and strengthening its eastern front while Russia’s image continues to crumble. Perhaps Beijing is not the safest and most reliable buffer.
All this reasoning has a Western logic. However, Moscow on the geopolitical chessboard has represented a very particular actor; a kind of Bizarro, not because of the typical incorrect use of this adjective in English, but because of that enemy of Superman who copies him in a distorted form and comes from a cube-shaped planet governed by a Bizarro Code that dictates: “We do the opposite of all earthly things! The Warsaw Pact was a good example of something out of that world: a military alliance that invaded only its own members.
The Tsar sat on his autocracy, feudalism and landlordism as the West gradually spilled over all the seas of industry and rights, then the Soviet Union locked itself into the largest cube, the squares of which were peeling away with the disfigured Western reflection.
Today, after the humiliation of the 1990s and with an ever-tightening Atlantic encirclement, this bizarre country (in the correct usage of the term) has become more bizarre than ever: a federation ruled without discussion from Moscow; a republic with a dictator, whose military reconstitution has left the other trappings of an empire by the wayside.
Here is a huge, vacuous, wounded beast that may change its coat, but always remains that familiar, exotic contrast. Thus it keeps oscillating always within its cubic incomplete immensity: in the manner of gatopardy, this grizzly bear changes shape to remain the necessary bad guy who loses without disappearing under a restless curtain; a bicontinental regional power with universal aspirations, although it ultimately maintains the same zone of influence around its borders, more or less wide depending on the time.
There he prepares the performance that gives meaning to his Dostoevskian existence, a spectacle in the global theatre that the West, adorning the smoky blue of his frizzy hair with a heavy, volatile hat as curled as it is starry, enjoys and suffers from its comfortable, widened armchair.
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