The focus of political and media attention has inevitably turned from Europe to the Middle East, where the United States, through the Secretary of the Pentagon, has insisted on “Israel’s right to defend itself,” has welcomed the assassinations of Hezbollah leaders carried out by means of massive bombings in Beirut, and has given explicit approval to the ground operation with which Tel Aviv and Washington claim to want to “dismantle the attack infrastructure along the border to ensure that the Lebanese Hezbollah cannot carry out attacks in the style of October 7 against communities in northern Israel.” The precedent of the last twelve months in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon foreshadows what the ways of defending oneself against Israel will be and that the United States will continue to justify any excess, selective assassination or massacre, while any response, such as that which occurred yesterday with the launching of Iranian missiles against Israeli military bases, will be considered an unacceptable escalation. And although Ukraine’s public concern for securing priority war status has not yet begun, any escalating war could affect Kiev, especially when it comes to imposing its discourse of existential war on the West as a collective.
Those in the media who denounced the Russian invasion and have been criticising the use of a special military operation instead of war for two and a half years now describe the Israeli invasion of Lebanon as a “limited incursion”, a “targeted operation” or simply a “ground operation”. Meanwhile, NATO is meeting to ensure that everything remains the same. As already announced, Jens Stoltenberg, who has led the Atlantic Alliance during this last decade of refusing to negotiate with Russia that would avoid the current war scenario, passed the baton to former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, warmly welcomed by Zelensky’s right-hand man, Andriy Yermak, who wrote that he thanked him “for his continued support for Ukraine and his important contribution to strengthening security and stability in Europe. I wish him success in his new role, strength and inspiration”. The new Secretary General reaffirmed that “the priorities will continue. In Ukraine, we have to ensure that it prevails as a sovereign, independent and democratic nation”.
With elections suspended indefinitely and a democracy with serious shortcomings and a tendency towards authoritarianism long before the Russian invasion and independence so limited that Kiev needs foreign subsidies to move its army and pay its salaries and pensions, only the Ukrainian nation remains, whose survival was never in question. The state and the government managed to hold firm in February 2022, while the nation as a social, cultural, political and historical fact is not something that Russia could destroy with artillery and missiles. What has been in question in the last decade is the conception of the nation and the meaning of being Ukrainian, an identity that post-Maidan Ukraine has tried to modify in order to eliminate any trace of an idea of the nation that did not imply forgetting the common past with Russia and the Soviet Union in favor of an exclusionary nationalism rejected by a significant part of the population of Crimea and Donbass. But none of these details are important to NATO, which simply wants things to continue as they are, adding only the possibility of using long-range Western missiles against Russian territory, since, according to the new Secretary General, “the right to defend oneself does not end at the border.” Only for the Alliance’s allies, of course.
Rutte’s talk of continuity is striking given the dire international context, especially in the Middle East, but also in Ukraine, where the Financial Times describes a situation dire enough on the front that soldiers and commanders are starting to talk diplomacy. “At a command post near the besieged town of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, soldiers from the Separate Presidential Brigade bemoan Washington’s hesitation over whether Kiev can use Western missiles to strike targets inside Russia. “If they were able to fight “with two hands instead of one tied behind their back,” then the brave Ukrainian troops might stand a chance against a more powerful Russian army, one attack drone operator laments,” the outlet writes, without explaining how firing missiles inside Russia would improve the situation for the Ukrainian grouping on the Krasnoarmeysk front or in places such as Ugledar, where the Russian tricolor and the Victory Banner were raised for the first time yesterday over the ruins of the local administration building.
“Ukraine is heading towards what may be its darkest moment of the war so far. It is losing on the battlefield in the east of the country to the relentless advance of Russian forces,” he writes, adding the obligatory tagline that Russian progress is coming “at an immense cost in men and material.” “If the United States turns off the tap, we are finished,” says a soldier from the 72nd Brigade, which is not mentioned as having been decimated by senseless fighting in the town of Ugledar. Once again, Ukraine has prioritized continuing the battle to inflict casualties on Russia at the expense of increasing its own. Despite these enormous costs, which have undoubtedly been paid by both armies, it is not the Russian soldiers but the Ukrainians who say that “now, I am thinking more about how to save my people” and add that “it is quite difficult to imagine that we will be able to push the enemy back to the 1991 borders” before finally declaring that they are “in favor of negotiations.”
In political terms, the Financial Times takes a very negative view of Zelensky’s latest tour, after which “the Ukrainian leader left Washington empty-handed on two key issues: US permission to use Western weapons in long-range strikes against Russian territory and progress in Ukraine’s NATO accession process. With the possibility of Biden approving the bombings before the November elections uncertain, the focus is beginning to shift to the NATO option, especially given that, according to the newspaper, “US officials were not impressed by Zelensky’s ‘victory plan’, which includes a request for large quantities of Western weaponry.”
“An adviser who helped prepare the document says Zelensky had no choice but to reaffirm his insistence on NATO membership because anything else would have been perceived as a step back on the issue of Western security guarantees, which Ukrainians consider indispensable,” adds the Financial Times, which pretends not to know that entry into the Atlantic Alliance is an objective as essential for Kiev as accession to the EU since 2014. Not in vain was the irrevocable Euro-Atlantic vocation included in the preamble to the Constitution.
Two paragraphs in the article have particularly caught the eye. In them, it refers both to Ukraine’s goals and to an apparent moderation of Kiev’s expectations. “Ukraine’s new foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, used private meetings with Western counterparts on his first trip to the United States in office to discuss possible compromise solutions, diplomats said, and he took a more pragmatic tone about the possibility of land-for-security negotiations than his predecessor.
“We are talking more and more openly about how this will end and what Ukraine would have to give up in order to achieve a permanent peace agreement,” said one of the diplomats present in New York. “And that is a significant change from even six months ago, when such conversations were taboo,” wrote the newspaper, which is particularly eager to see a major shift in Ukrainian politics and diplomacy.
For months, the possibility of quick access to NATO as a way of defining Kiev’s victory at the cost of part of the territories lost in the last two years or in the last decade has given rise to numerous proposals to freeze the conflict. The fact that the first of them came from the Office of the President of Ukraine makes such a proposal acceptable to Kiev. However, this version forgets that the proposal of Andriy Yermak’s chief lobbyist, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was not a peace initiative, even temporarily, but to bring NATO to the front line, with the intention of applying Article V of collective security and forcing the Alliance to respond to any Russian attack on that line of separation, a recipe for guaranteed war.
“Ukrainian public opinion also seems more open to peace talks,” adds the Financial Times, adding, however, that “not necessarily to the concessions that it might require.” This position is also held by the government and the President’s Office, which has repudiated in recent months ideas that it sees as consolation prizes if they come at the cost of losing territory, a solution as improbable as it is unviable. As Leonid Ragozin recalled yesterday, “that has never been an option for Putin, since this war is about NATO.” The Russian opposition journalist regrets the missed opportunity of autumn 2022, when with Russia in its weakest position, an understanding would have been easier. Now, Ragozin is convinced that “Putin will continue to push until the NATO option is no longer on the table. It would be foolish to think otherwise.” Especially when the option open to Russia would be the German way: Ukraine’s entry into NATO in its current form, i.e. with the territories under its control, pending future reunification . The memory of what was in practice the annexation of the German Democratic Republic is all too vivid for a man who in those years was stationed in Dresden and who even in his early years, when he was openly seeking an understanding with the West, criticised Mikhail Gorbachev for having withdrawn from the GDR prematurely. To trust that NATO can provide a solution to the conflict is akin to believing that Israel can achieve “de-escalation by escalation”, which has brought the Middle East to the brink of all-out war.
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