Until a little over two months ago, a conflict in Europe seemed impossible to everyone. We thought, in fact, that we had forever relegated war to the history books. In short, the conflict in Ukraine is the catastrophe we did not expect. It is a drama with unpredictable outcomes that already upsets our daily life and that will probably mark the history of the next few years. The war in Ukraine is an immense trench that brings us back to the nightmares of indiscriminate bombing, mass graves, besieged cities. Mariupol like Aleppo. Kiev like Sarajevo.
For more than two months now we have been trying to understand what is happening, asking ourselves more and more often if everything was really unpredictable. How come we have not noticed, in recent years, a lit fuse that was about to blow up the Third World War? And why did we let Vladimir Putin become a danger to the entire international community?
Corriere della Sera correspondent Francesco Battistini, who has been dealing with Ukraine for years, has experienced the escalation of this crisis on the ground and day by day. It followed the months of the Russian troops massing at the border, of the growing fear in the Donbass, of inconclusive diplomacy. Traveling the length and breadth of Ukraine, from Lviv to Kharkiv, from Chernobyl to Odessa, he recounted almost daily a front that was heating up by the hour. Until February 24, the beginning of the invasion. Now this story - and much more - has converged on the Ukrainian Front (Neri Pozza, 2022, Euro 18, pp. 272. Also Ebook), a book that is essential to read if we want to understand what is happening in Europe.
Where does this war come from?
“February 24 was the 11th of September in Europe. And as for the 11th of September, we cannot think that everything began only on that day. The invasion began at least a year earlier, not only for the NATO question: it all started when the Ukrainian President Zelensky promulgated the law that affected the Ukrainian oligarchs who were friends of Putin, starting with that Medvedchuk whom we have seen in uniform in recent weeks , upset, captured by the troops of Kiev and used for a possible exchange of prisoners. That law struck Medvedchuk, a personal friend of the Tsar, owner of pro-Russian TV and a party paid for by Moscow. A few days later, in general inattention, Putin decided to deploy three thousand paras on the border with Ukraine. It was February 2021, the real start of the invasion. Then, as we know, today's war had lasted for eight years and is the daughter of the Maidan revolt in 2014, grandson of the Orange Revolution in 2004 and great grandson of the 1991 independence: a tear from Moscow that followed the fall of the Wall. The Ukrainian front, therefore, did not open in 2022 ”.
Why have we been so blown away by the conflict here in the West despite the signals coming from the borders between Russia and Ukraine?
“Because we Europeans have always considered Ukraine, and ultimately also the relationship with Russia, a largely economic issue. We cared about gas, our investments, the banks, at most importing some caregivers from the poorest regions. We let the Americans decide Kiev's policy: when the Maidan uprising broke out in 2014, and the square overthrew the pro-Russian regime, a US diplomat was intercepted saying that Europeans could 'fuck themselves'. We also persisted in believing that Putin was an interlocutor like any other. The annexation of Crimea was an unprecedented violation of international law, yet they shrugged: in 2014 I was in Sevastopol and I remember the Italian singers who came to celebrate 'independence' in concerts paid for by the Kremlin, the MEPs of the League a ' to certify 'the transparency of the farce-referendum, a robbery disguised as a popular consultation, with the Russian soldiers who presided over the polling stations ”.
How is the war that threatens Europe from within for you who found yourself in the middle?
“A classic invasion war. With two opposing armies. Very different from the asymmetrical ones of Afghanistan and Syria, or from that of the coalition seen in Iraq. I don't know if by choice or by necessity, the Russians entered Ukraine with the handbrake on: it is not like this - without closing supplies, without hitting power plants, without cutting off access routes - that a metropolis is attacked like Kiev. Putin attempted the blitz to cut off the enemy's head and eliminate Zelensky. Now it seems to me that he is falling back on a war that is the continuation of the previous one, in the Donbass and in the South, but ten times more aggressive ”.
How divided is Ukrainian society internally?
“Until February 24th, we had two peoples and one state. And a broken, corrupt political class that reflected the same civil war climate. Zelensky's predecessor, Poroshenko, lived in exile in Poland until January because he was pursued by the investigations that Zelensky himself had unleashed against him. And the two leaders were making terrible accusations. Now we see a country united in resistance. Russian speakers have also become anti-Russian, and this is an unexpected problem for Putin. Moscow perhaps underestimated how much the fatigue and deaths of eight years of war in the Donbass weighed on Ukrainian public opinion, even on pro-Russian opinion. Today we can imagine it, but in reality we do not know for sure what could come out of a referendum on the annexation to Moscow, if it really could be organized in Kherson and in the Russian-speaking cities, naturally under international supervision and with all the necessary guarantees. of transparency. We have no idea what Ukraine we will find after the war ”.
You finish your preface with a poem by Clemente Rebora describing the anguish of the soldiers during the Great War, and with an invitation to "buy us an umbrella in time". What kind of umbrella do we need?
“That's how it went for Ukraine now. I think about future crises. To all these wounds of the world that we regularly ignore, until the blood and pain are poured into our lives as well. Who knows what is happening in Yemen, Eritrea or Congo? Who really takes a stand now on the tortured in China or Saudi Arabia? It took the Regeni case to open our eyes to Al Sisi's Egypt. Like the soldiers in Rebora's poetry who agonize in the trenches, we always and only wait for the screams of those who suffer to no longer reach us. But it doesn't work like this: the silence of death never corresponds to the silence of peace ”.
