A month has passed since the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Apocalyptic scenarios emerge from it, which Putin and Medvedev evoke in bombastic rallies in the Luzhniki stadium and in all other Moscow venues. However, the omens seem not to be fulfilled, despite the endless barrages of missiles and the constant proclamations of Bakhmut’s final conquest. On the other side, very harsh positions -American and European- alternate with respect to the supply of ultra-modern and ultra-powerful weapons, with a view to reconquer once and for all the Donbass, Crimea and maybe even Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg; but the truth is that they are still bogged down in the slow thaw of Bakhmut.
While the option of a hypersonic and nuclear confrontation recedes, hopes are timidly reborn for a way out of the tragedy of war, if not with peace, at least with some agreement to achieve a truce. After the paternal caresses of the Chinese leader Xi Jinping to what now seems to be his Muscovite vassal – whom he advised not to go too far with the bombs – the question from the East to the West is how to achieve a definitive ceasefire. Among other things, because the booming arms industries now seem less interested in a conflict that is generating more costs than benefits.
It is clear that History does not teach anything, otherwise there would be no more wars for many centuries; but a distant date can still serve as an inspiration: 1686, which marked the end of the war between the Russian Tsar and the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom of Rzeczpospolita. The conflict had begun in 1654, and ended with the agreement that the chronicles of the time called “Eternal Peace” -in Russian, Vecnyj Mir– to shape the russkij mir, the European face of the empire. In effect, it was a truce that became a “definitive” agreement between the two great rivals over the eastern part of Europe. The document, with an extensive preamble and 33 articles, was signed in Moscow by the voevoda Pole Poznansky and Russian prince Golitsyn.
The negotiations sealed the fruits of an earlier truce, that of Andrusovo (a Bakhmut-like village situated on the Russian-Polish border) in 1667. By this time Moscow had repurchased Kiev for the roaring sum of 146,000 rubles, assuring to the tsar the possession of the mother-city of ancient Rus, which was only lost in 1991, with the end of the USSR. With the handover of kyiv, the Patriarchate of Constantinople ceded to the Patriarchate of Moscow the right to appoint the Metropolitan of kyiv, who would remain a member of the Synod of the Russian Church. It was precisely this ecclesiastical aspect of the agreement that was subsequently called into question in 2018, when Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople granted the tomes of autocephaly to the Kiev Church, arguing that the Moscow rights of the 17th century were to be understood as “temporary protection” that had already expired.
Eternal Peace handed over to Russia the territories of present-day Ukraine and Belarus, and especially the Cossack Hetmanate (semi-nomadic kingdom) of Zaporožskaja Seč -which more or less corresponds to today’s Donbass- the land where the most violent and decisive confrontations had taken place. of that time. It was precisely the Cossacks who promoted the revolts against the Rzeczpospolita, invoking the protection of the first tsars of the Romanov dynasty, Mikhail and Aleksej, thus beginning the history of Ukraine.
In fact, their territories were defined by the Russians as ukrainy, free and “frontier” zones (because they were outside the lands owned by the boyars and the Church) where the peasants were forced into serfdom. For this reason, Poland granted Russia the protectorate of Levobereznaja Ukraine, the area west of the Dnieper, reserving for itself the territories of Galicia and Volhynia, the Ukrainian regions that since then had remained linked to the kingdoms of Western Europe. The freedom to belong to any of the ecclesiastical jurisdictions was also recognized, both the Orthodox (by then quite varied) and the Catholic, divided between the faithful of the Latin rite and the Greek-Catholics, whose reciprocal hostility was even greater than the rejection towards the orthodox.
Russia vowed to annul its previous agreements with the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Khanate Tatars, and even joined Pope Innocent XI’s newly inaugurated “Holy League” with Germans, Poles and Venetians to defeat the Turks, a war between Christians and Muslims that ended in turn with a “definitive truce” in 1699. Meanwhile, the Russians pounced on the Tatars with the Crimean campaigns of 1687-89, without managing to conquer the peninsula, which only Empress Catherine II managed to subdue a century later. These alliances culminated in the Crimean War of 1853, in which the Russian Empire managed to antagonize all of Europe and then led to the ruinous revolutionary phase that led to the “eternal confrontation” of the Cold War after the world wars of the last century. It is what Putin’s current war heralds as the “new world order.”
The Russians assure that they are always ready to sit at a negotiating table, to reaffirm the rights of the Eternal Peace of the 17th century, if only to settle for Pravoberežnaja, the Ukrainian territory east of the Dnieper that was already annexed by the Russians. referendums in Crimea and the four regions of Donbass.
In reality, the Kremlin warns that Russia fears pressure from “nationalists”, as the most radical and belligerent sectors are called, who would also want the western part of Ukraine, including Kiev, on whose throne they would install the Cook Prigozhinthe heir to the Cossack hetmans.
In any case, according to the Moscow version, if peace talks are not started, it is always the fault of the Anglo-Saxons, who do not want to give up their dominance over the American and European empires and over the rest of the world. If not for Biden, the Russians argue, Zelensky would have submitted by now. Washington will not allow any negotiations, neither to the Ukrainians nor to the Europeans, at least until the presidential elections of November 2024. And in the electoral call, the Russians will encourage the population to vote for Trump, or whoever can replace the hated democrats, political formation whose name expresses all the depravity of the West.
Meanwhile, support for Ukraine, or the peace initiatives that follow one another, distinguish the political alignments of the affected countries. This happens especially in Europe, where ideological dimensions are used, implicit in the terms “Atlantism”, “Europeanism”, “pacifism” and “Putinism”. But the concern of the countries is not focused on the “tormented Ukraine”, as Pope Francis calls it, but on securing votes and consensus in their own internal diatribes.
International organizations fail to meet their commitments, starting with the UN, now turned into a lavish and wasteful relic of the 20th century, no more credible than the English or Spanish royal house. In the ecclesiastical sphere, another institute that tries to intervene but is obviously not at its best is the Ecumenical Council of Churches (WCC, in English, World Council of Churches, WCC). The WCC proposed to Pope Francis that he support a “round table” with representatives of the Ukrainian Churches and the Moscow Patriarchate, at least to resolve the thorny issue of kyiv Monastery of the Caves. The meeting should be held in Geneva, one of the religiously neutral places: in his years as a young bishop, Kirill, the current Patriarch of Moscow, developed “Soviet” ecumenism there during the Brezhnev years, and the city it houses the operational offices of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.
In reality, Patriarch Bartholomew does not seem to be very in tune with the members of the WCC, since in recent days he has made ardent statements against the Russian Church, inviting interreligious dialogue bodies to unite to marginalize the Moscow Patriarchate, “co-responsible for war crimes” along with the Kremlin, especially the deportation of Ukrainian children. Indeed, it was precisely the Russian Orthodox parishes and monasteries that immediately made themselves available to welcome and “re-educate” orphans. This led to international condemnation from the court in The Hague (another body with little impact at this point). But beyond this aspect, the fundamental question remains: where to start to build peace?
The Pope proposes himself as a mediator, and his personality continues to be one of the few truly authorized at the international level, not only in the ecclesiastical sphere. The truce will certainly not be decided by the clergy, and perhaps not even by the generals or the politicians: much will depend on the economic powerful, and on the accounts between the owners of the weapons and those of the energy sources. It seems more and more likely that history will end up repeating itself: it will once again be an “eternal truce”, in which both parties will stand firm in their own convictions and territorial and geopolitical definitions, as many similar situations in various parts of the world teach us, starting with Israel and Palestine, where war and truce have alternated since the time of Abraham.
When the guns fall silent, the real negotiations will begin, not on the kilometers to be distributed around the banks of the Dnieper-Dnipro, but on the authentic “traditional spiritual and moral values”, which Russia claims as its own, but which are actually common to all Christians and followers of other religions, in Europe and America, in Russia and China, in the world of human beings in all latitudes. And they will be, in effect, eternal negotiations.
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