Nor was the annexation of Belarus announced, as certain propagandists even fantasized, nor was a word said about China’s role in the conflict despite the fact that wang yi, the foreign affairs minister, is visiting Moscow these days, nor was a new mobilization that would mean a practical change in the balance of forces on the ground justified. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The image of a tiny Putin on a grandiose stage full of Russian flags was the best example of what this year has been like for the Russian president: an achievement of military and political disasters that have left him in utter solitude.
His succession of hyperbole with a paranoid tone that one would expect from state television programs, but not from a statesman, not only does not change the situation in Ukraine at all, but also portray a man lost in insane rhetoric. Not even his own seemed enthusiastic about the historical tour of grievances: the former president and former prime minister, Dimitri Medvedev, appeared in several shots taking a nap while the leader spoke about him. Nobody can blame him.
[Joe Biden responde a las amenazas de Putin desde Polonia: “La OTAN es hoy más fuerte que nunca”]
The feeling, fortunately, is one of missed opportunity. US intelligence is concerned these days about several issues: the possible entry of China into the conflict by sending weapons to Moscow, the imminent second offensive that may coincide with the anniversary of the first and the strange decision of the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko to arm one hundred and fifty thousand of its citizens for supposed defense maneuvers. None of that appeared in Putin’s speech.
How to defeat the West
The Austro-Hungarian Empire, the transgender conspiracy and the need to protect children from the perversion of the West. In fact, virtually the entire speech was an explanatory statement to hate the West in the same way that the West supposedly hates Russia. These slogans, which were able to function for seventy years in the Soviet Union, are difficult to assimilate after three decades of openness and globalization. Russia has been a key player in the cultural and economic progress of the West in this period as the West has been in Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin addresses the Federal Assembly in Moscow on Tuesday.
Putin does not see it that way, blame NATO and the European Union for all the ills and, specifically, the prolongation of its “special military operation” in the Ukraine, which has suddenly become a Western aggression on the integrity and very existence of Russia. That was where Putin began to make threats, but not even in that field did he know or could be original. He assured that if the weapons that reached his neighboring country had a greater range, there would be no choice but to advance even further to move them away.
What he didn’t explain was how he would get it. A year after the start of the invasion, Russia has not even been able to take Bakhmut. Neither its regular army, nor the guerrillas of the Donetsk People’s Army, nor those of the Luhansk People’s Army, nor the Chechen volunteers, nor the mercenaries of the Wagner Group. Putin made it clear that the war was continuing, but unfortunately no one expected otherwise. In fact, the scariest the Russian president is when flirts with peace offers that are known to never be fulfilled.
[En las colas del hambre de Kramatorsk: 30.000 familias sobreviven con la ayuda humanitaria]
the nuclear threat
The other big threat, of course, had to do with nuclear weapons. Is a constant from the first day of the conflict: Russia cannot lose the war because before losing it, it would prefer an atomic holocaust. Well, that’s very relative. The nuclear powers have lost wars in the past, and they have done it with a bang: the United States did it in Vietnam and the Soviet Union itself did it in Afghanistan before destroying itself. Unable to prevail in a conventional war, the russians and their propagandists always appeal to the nuclear card to alarm the rest of the world. The problem is that the rest of the world is less and less afraid.
For example, him announcement of Russia’s withdrawal from the START III treaty of control of nuclear warheads to control their proliferation is nothing more than a new toast to the sun. In practice, Russia and the United States have long since stopped inspecting their nuclear arsenals. As the journalist Nacho Montes de Oca affirms, Putin terminated these mutual inspections when the sanctions made it impossible for his experts to carry them out, which, we insist, in practice, is to render the treaty nothing.
Joe Biden with Zelenski during his visit to kyiv this Monday, February 20.
EFE
The nuclear threat has been around too long to think that if a large-scale or tactical nuclear attack was going to do Russia any good, it would not have attempted it. The Kremlin wins more by threatening than by hitting. More than anything because, as China itself reminded him last weekend at the Munich Security Conference, a nuclear war is something to be avoided at all costs, since there can be no winner.
Definitely, Putin’s speech leaves things as they were waiting for him to make some kind of public intervention at the party-concert scheduled for this Wednesday at the Luzhniki stadium and which is expected to be attended by two hundred thousand people. Meanwhile, Biden continues to take mass baths across Poland and Russian internal dissensions are more public than ever with complaints from Eugeni Prigozhin, who has accused the Defense Ministry of not supplying him with enough weapons. Putin didn’t say anything about that either, of course.
