Ukraine is a geopolitical game between Russia and the West. And it has winners and losers. The recent Minsk II agreements were yet another game in which Russia has moved wisely their pieces. Meanwhile, the moves and countermoves of diplomacy end up obscuring the war and its dead toll.
One day a Russian-Ukrainian friend of mine asked me why, in my opinion, if there is war in Ukraine everyone is talking about Putin, Obama and their fellows. The answer I gave is pretty much this. When you comment a chess game, all eyes are on the players and their moves. Nobody ever talks about the chessboard itself. Here, Ukraine is a bit this, the chessboard on which the great powers move their pieces. And it’s cynically obvious that the reality runs in the background.
The agreements made by the “Normandy format” last week in Minsk have decreed winners and losers. A week later, we can already draw a first balance and try to figure out who made the right moves and who didn’t.
Peace disagreements
Who wanted what in Minsk? We should try to answer this question to make the whole picture clear. Poroshenko wants the fighting ended in Donbass. Not because he is a pacifist at all costs – beyond the image that is striving to give – but because Kiev can no longer afford the war. The state deposits are empty, the country is on the brink of default and military operations cost 10 million dollars a day. And the results on the field are a collection of defeats that risk undermining the morale of the military, with catastrophic results.
Holland and Merkel, along with half of Europe, want the rehabilitation of Russia, to pardon the Kremlin for the annexation of the Crimea and the war in Donbass, to remove the sanctions and continue to do business with Russia. And Putin?
Everything and its opposite has been written on the plans of the Russian president in Ukraine. But it seems now clear that what Russia needs is a low intensity war, a frozen conflict, to serve as a crowbar to destabilize Ukraine and throughout the region. This also Minsk II was a checkmate to Europe.
Pain in the neck
Take a map of Eastern Europe. All along the fault line that was the Soviet border with the rest of Europe, Russia has its wedges in the cracks of Europe: the exclave of Kaliningrad to the north, with its Iskander missiles in the heart of NATO, Transnistria to the south as a pain in the neck of the Eastern Partnership, and now the Crimea in the Black Sea and the Donbass bubbling further east. A planar fracture that threatens to split in two the Eurasian continent, even more the iron curtain used to.
Meanwhile, the war has never stopped killing.
While bogged diplomats were moving their pawns from a large room full of marbles, artillery never stopped thundering in Donetsk. The distance between the reality and the big game was, and remains, stellar.
Even when the ink of the signatures had not dried out, the battle raged around Debaltseve like never before. So much so that many had already decreed the agreement failure. But maybe it’s too early to say. Because maybe, this is what has been decided in Minsk: the withdrawal of the Ukrainians, the conquest of the Russian-Novorussian strategic hub, the rebound of the charges for violations of the truce, the uncertainty for the maintenance of peace and the OSCE saying that the ceasefire holds. Pawns do not stop moving on the Ukrainian chessboard.
@daniloeliatweet
One day a Russian-Ukrainian friend of mine asked me why, in my opinion, if there is war in Ukraine everyone is talking about Putin, Obama and their fellows. The answer I gave is pretty much this. When you comment a chess game, all eyes are on the players and their moves. Nobody ever talks about the chessboard itself. Here, Ukraine is a bit this, the chessboard on which the great powers move their pieces. And it’s cynically obvious that the reality runs in the background.
The agreements made by the “Normandy format” last week in Minsk have decreed winners and losers. A week later, we can already draw a first balance and try to figure out who made the right moves and who didn’t.
