Ukraine, a conflict to reshape the present and the future

Europe has been at war for some months. Here in Italy, a few thousand kilometers from the Ukrainian front, we pretend not to be or perhaps we pretend not to know. We live the conflict as if it were a talk show clash, where the commentators first slaughter each other by popular acclaim and then, with the cameras off, they gather at the buffet to toast to tarallucci and wine before the next cathode ring.

Meanwhile, the price of electricity and gasoline is rising, raw materials are scarce, doubts about food supplies and about what next autumn and winter will be like in general are growing. On the military front, the West and Russia are increasingly frowning and sharpening their weapons ... they seem to have forgotten how Europe fell after the last war between great powers, about eighty years ago.

In this somewhat surreal time it is easy to divide into sides as if it were in a video game or in an episode of a Amici: exhume the ancient factions, with pro-Russians and pro-Ukrainians in place of the Guelphs and Ghibellines. It is easy to believe in oversimplifications or, worse, propaganda. Conversely, we should take a step back from the debate, acquire that distance that helps understanding and facilitates reflection. This is what Orietta Moscatelli helps us to do in her latest work, "P" (Salerno Editrice, pp. 160, also e-book), an essay in which she embraces the context of the clash between Ukraine and Russia and between the West and Russia, he digs deep roots , and in conclusion ventures some hypotheses on its possible outcome, as Lucio Caracciolo explains well in the preface to the volume.

In short, we are far from the many instant-books released in recent months, also because Orietta Moscatelli, in addition to being one of the leading analysts of the geopolitical magazine Limes , has been studying and frequenting Russia for over thirty years. Not surprisingly, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is analyzed in the book from the Russian side , that is, trying to understand what prompted Putin to invade Ukraine on February 24th.

For Orietta Moscatelli with a wartime gamble probably destined to generate other conflicts, the Russian leader has put his hand to the imperial project to reunify the three Russias (Russia of Moscow with Ukraine and Belarus), looking for a counterweight to the historic defeat of 2014 , when Kiev it had finally come out of Moscow's orbit and had come dangerously close to the West. Putin's move is impossible to understand without trying to decipher, as the author does, the psychology of Moscow power, the system that blocks its action with authoritarian automatisms, the ideology that promotes its values: Putinism . This is what this book tries to do, looking at Russia from the inside: P as Putin, P as Putinism, therefore, but also and above all P, which in the Cyrillic alphabet reads R, as Россия (Russia), because the Russian leader he feels called to embody the destiny of his country, in whose name he has launched a challenge to the American-led world order.

Yes, because Ukrainian gambling can only be understood from the point of view of a Russia that wants to try to turn the tables and wants to try to put an end to the economic, military and even cultural hegemony of the United States and the West. To do so, it has waged a war that throws the world into a long and lasting battle for the reorganization of global assets . A clash in which China is for now only an interested spectator, while more and more often its fighter fighters whiz across the skies of Taiwan.