Jesús González Mateos
Director of The Diplomat in Spain and Aquí Europa
We owe to Leo Tolstoy, one of the most universal literary works, his novel “War and Peace”. The great Russian writer teaches us that despite all the bad things in life, humanity is leaving behind, little by little, the worst that it carries with it. We will have to hold on to this message of hope when the world seems to be hurtling towards the abyss of a new great war.
The qualitative leap made by the British missile attack by Ukraine on Russian territory threatens a response from the Kremlin, the dimensions of which we do not know, but not Putin’s intentions for a show of force, which could include nuclear weapons. All this is happening barely two months before the inauguration of the re-elected President of the United States, Donald Trump, who has shown himself to be a firm supporter of ending this war in an express peace negotiation. In this macabre scenario, the hypotheses of what can happen are multiple and it is convenient to have them properly analyzed.
ATTACK TO NEGOTIATE. It is clear that President Zelenski interprets Trump’s words as an invitation to surrender. If the U.S. cuts off the supply of arms, military and intelligence support, Ukraine will hardly be able to continue to withstand the sledgehammer force of continuous Russian attacks. Hence, this latest offensive by the outgoing Biden Administration is interpreted more as a form of resistance and a show of force for when the time comes to negotiate, than as a real possibility of recovering the occupied territories and thus winning the war. As of today, Ukraine has lost three very important territories to Russia: the Crimean peninsula, and the regions of Donetsk and Donbas. If we extrapolate their proportional extension to the Iberian Peninsula, we would be talking about a large part of Andalusia, the region of Murcia and part of Levante. This is the price Ukraine would have to pay if at the peace negotiating table it were forced to hand over these regions to Russia.
THE NUCLEAR RISK. But the first thing we must keep in mind in this situation is that in a war, any approach on paper or on maps, jumps out of control when someone gets out of control. Attacking Russian territories with missiles has a major risk: the Russian response with nuclear weapons. If that were to happen, in addition to the tragic consequences, it is difficult to hypothesize about the reaction of the Western world. Nuclear deterrence has proven to be the main element of peace in the world since World War II. The horror of the images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have lingered in the collective memory of humanity as an element of inaction resulting from the terror they provoke. The escalation of the use of nuclear weapons is unimaginable because it could lead to the disappearance of our genus. But it can always happen that someone, who remains outside this collective subconscious, activates the nuclear button and with it the global disaster. The fact that it has not happened so far is no guarantee that madness will not be unleashed.
THE PEACE SCENARIO. If we place ourselves in the most optimistic hypothesis of the current war scenario, we would be a few months away from a negotiation for a peace agreement in Ukraine, fundamentally driven from the Trump White House. Russia would win the occupied territories and could sell it as a momentary victory, at the expense of completing its offensive later and regaining the whole of the country it considers “mother Rus”. Ukraine would save its furniture by keeping its national identity and a sovereign territory. Trump would paradoxically become the peacemaker before the world and the European Union would fulfill its usual role of paying for the broken dishes and carrying out the reconstruction of Ukraine with European funds. But let no one be fooled, we will surely all breathe easier if all this happens. However, the reality is that, firstly, we could bring literature back to the case and paraphrase the verses of José Hierro, “so much for nothing”. And, above all, secondly, giving in to the aggressor means sending a message of dangerous claudication that emboldens the autocrat and weakens the reason for freedom, democracy and respect for human rights.
© This article was originally published in Aquí Europa
