DMore and more uninhibited in their support for Ukraine, Westerners have since this week clearly shown their wish to see Moscow bite the dust, seeming to assume the risk of escalation and slippage towards war.
“We want to see Russia weakened to such a degree that they can’t do the same kinds of things as the invasion of Ukraine,” Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin said Monday. Couldn’t be clearer.
Washington then gathered around forty countries, including all of NATO, on Tuesday at Ramstein in Germany to organize large-scale support for Ukraine.
On Wednesday, it was the head of British diplomacy Liz Truss who called for “redouble” the “support”, by giving “heavy weapons, tanks, planes”, and wished to push “Russia out of all Ukraine”, therefore including Crimea annexed since 2014.
On Thursday, Joe Biden requested a $33 billion extension from Congress primarily to provide more military equipment to Ukraine. The United States “does not attack” Russia but “helps the Ukrainians to defend themselves” and has already delivered ten anti-tank weapons for each Russian tank, assured the American president on this occasion.
It is necessary “to go back to the Euromissile crisis at the end of the 1970s” to find such a level of tension in the declarations, explains to AFP Emilia Robin, a historian specializing in the Cold War at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris. “We called it the + fresh war + because it came after a period of relaxation. It then calmed down with the arrival of (Mikhail) Gorbachev (at the head of the USSR) and the resumption of negotiations”.
“Unity in Firmness”
“Unity in firmness now prevails”, analyzes for AFP Jean-Sylvestre Mongrenier, of the Franco-Belgian institute Thomas More.
“The United States thus takes the direction of a new coalition, where as always they provide 70% of the means”, estimates on Twitter the analyst and former officer Michel Goya. Not in soldiers on the ground as in Afghanistan or Iraq, but in military means. “With open warfare as the only limit,” underlines Mr. Goya.
Westerners have fallen into “a second phase of the war”, analyzes Florent Parmentier, teacher at Sciences-Po in Paris. “There is a form of change, there is more and more talk of encouraging Ukraine on the road to victory” now that this country has proven its ability to resist so far, he told AFP.
“Westerners are part of the prospect of a war that will last,” said Marie Dumoulin, a former diplomat and director of the Wider Europe program at the European Council for Foreign Relations (ECFR), also with AFP. , who sees a “continuity” in their action.
For Mr. Mongrenier, the change also comes from an evolution in the apprehension of Russian motivations. Europe “seems to have understood that the future of the continent (…) will be played out in the Don basin” to counter the Russian geopolitical project of “negotiating a new Yalta” restoring to it “the post-Soviet states”.
Faced with this change of pace, Russia responds on the military ground, hitting lines of communication, warehouses, to limit the effectiveness of Western support, but also on the semantic ground.
Risk of “World War 3” for Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, threat of “rapid and lightning” response in the event of interference from Vladimir Putin or even comments from the Kremlin according to which arms deliveries “threaten the European security.
Russia “considers quite simply that from the moment when there are more and more important deliveries of arms, the difference between the belligerents and non-intervention will become more and more fine”, judges Mr. Parmentier.
Russian “franchise”
“If tomorrow Russia considers that NATO is a co-belligerent or that one of the countries is doing a lot in terms of arms deliveries, it would not be surprising to see military strikes closer and closer to the borders in order to convey this message, we must recognize in the Russian leaders a certain form of frankness”, according to him.
Moreover, the Russian firing on the bridge over the Dniester estuary, through which aid from Romania passed, is part of this framework. For the French Minister of Affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian, the Russian declarations are a matter of “intimidation to which we must not give in”. France is “not at war with Russia”, he repeats.
For Mr. Mongrenier, we must not “reverse the responsibilities” of a possible conflagration, because it is Vladimir Putin’s Russia “engaged in a + reverse march +, to apply its geopolitical fantasies on the ground, which has relaunched the war against Ukraine, on an even larger scale, and which in fact threatens all the balances in Europe”.
But for the former Italian diplomat Marco Carnelos, of the firm MCGeopolicy, “certain Western leaders, in particular American and British, advance like sleepwalkers towards the war. I find that we are in the same situation as in the summer of 1914, with a gradual escalation, which culminated in World War I. We have the same dynamics, with a lot of misinterpretations, misperceptions on both sides.”
29/04/2022 01:16:39 – Paris (AFP) – © 2022 AFP