Who benefits from the breakdown of the grain export agreement between Russia and Ukraine? | The West deepens its confrontation with Putin

2023-07-18 02:39:29

For more than a decade, the West has often not listened to Vladimir Putin’s claims or warnings. And in international political relations, disregarding the adversary has its own cost, always. This seems to have happened with the rupture on Monday of the agreement that guaranteed the export of grains by Russia and Ukraine.

The same thing had happened at the beginning of the war in February 2022. Putin had been denouncing that the tacit agreements that the Western military alliance -NATO- would not advance into the Russian area of ​​influence were not being fulfilled. He said several times in public that the advance of foreign troops near his borders collided with the vital interest of his State and violated security protocols. Even when it was already clear that Russia intended to violate the principle of territoriality by invading Ukraine, the West did nothing but push this war that would probably have been avoided if they closed the doors of NATO to Volodimir Zelensky, instead of continuing to seduce him. A month after the invasion, the former prime minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, reached a pact between Russia and Ukraine that was knocked down: “there was a legitimate decision by the West to continue hitting Putin and not negotiate…they blocked the agreement,” he said the israeli. In this war, once again, the US and NATO seem to look at everything from their own Western-centric perspective, without considering the wishes or needs of the adversary. And so every agreement is broken.

The only agreement falls

It would be essential that the only agreement reached so far -indirectly- between Russia and Ukraine, be maintained. Firstly, because millions of people and children could fall into even greater misery and even famine. And second, because once again, the West once again pierces the little or no confidence that its adversary may have in it, today already a mortal enemy. And without trust, a peace agreement could never be reached in this war stuck in a swamp of blood and doomed to last for years with consequences for both peoples –especially the Ukrainians- and with the risk of nuclear attacks or accidents.

the endless war

The most realistic question is not “why the West once again pushes two brother nations to continue the fight”, but rather what it benefits from promoting the continuation of a war without leaving room for negotiation for either party. One possible answer is that up to now, the only winner has been the United States, which has already become the world’s largest gas exporter, displacing Russia from that podium, a country that has plunged into a war that is very damaging to itself – which it had believed of easy victory– which also isolated him with trade sanctions. In parallel, the world is rearming at an unprecedented speed – the US. it is the world’s largest exporter of arms– and NATO, which was in crisis, reunited and moved forward by incorporating Sweden and Finland. This theater of operations, at some point, could be repeated against China.

None of this implies defending Putin in something, but getting out of the simplifying binarism that is the best guarantee that this war will continue its dead end.