Last Saturday, in Cagliari, and not only there, the demonstration “Una Piazza per l'Europa” took place, to underline, among other things, the opposition to the rearmament proposed by Ursula Von der Leyen and the will to finally reach Peace by virtue of the “defense of European values”. Also on Saturday 15 March, the President of the Council of Ministers, Giorgia Meloni, had a telephone conversation with the Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia, Mohamed bin Salman al Saud, in order to discuss, in the context of this bilateral agreement (therefore, possibly, binding only for the participants), the ongoing initiatives and the shared commitment to a just and lasting peace in Ukraine.

Starmer, for his part, always with reference to the Ukrainian issue, would like to convene the "coalition of the willing" to which the country Italy would not be willing to send soldiers. What emerges, it would seem (the conditional is a must) is the initiative of individuals and the lack of a common and shared European coordination referring to a single decision-making center. And this, with good likelihood, would seem to be the true limit of the Old Continent which, for this very reason, may not have the negotiating power necessary to impose its decisions.

Probably, what would have been the terms of the "Ukraine" question, would seem to have emerged immediately, that is, when Donald Trump took the decision to contact his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, radically omitting to even seek functional coordination (at least courtesy) both with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (whose political role he seems to have made clear that he did not recognize, through elections, his fellow countrymen, at the time assigned to him) and, above all, with the European "allies". If we want to be necessarily concrete, in a nutshell, Donald Trump, in doing so, on the one hand, would seem (the dubious formula is imposed) to have given back a central role to Russia, isolated on the diplomatic, political and economic level by the previous Biden administration and, therefore, consequently, by the European Union itself which had adhered to the determinations of the same aforementioned administration sharing its actions and measures, and, on the other hand, would seem to have definitively excluded, a priori, the entry of Ukraine into NATO, as well as military aid, and therefore, still in a nutshell, would seem to have determined the exclusion of the European Union itself from the negotiating table due to the different, and perhaps even opposing, objectives to be achieved.

In this way, the whole affair, whether we like it or not, a role for the European Union, in the intention of the new tenant of the White House, does not seem to be contemplated and/or contemplable. Not the Chancelleries of the Old Continent, convinced supporters of the political vision of the Biden administration in relation to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, but, at the moment, only Vladimir Putin would seem to be able to consider himself as his sole interlocutor. It is no coincidence, it would seem, according to the news circulating, that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will hold a meeting to address the issue of a ceasefire. Whether it is really possible, in the short term, to create a common European army, is a very complex question and closely connected to the current structural organization of the European Union itself which, at the moment, is a political and economic union of a supranational nature composed of twenty-seven Member States. To put it differently, and to be clearer, the European Union has an institutional structure and competences that place it halfway, if we wanted to say so, between a Federal State and a Confederation of States. Resulting in the same, especially in doctrine, being defined as an Organization sui generis.

A non-secondary question, at least on the level of the internal politics of the individual Member States, would then seem to be that concerning the current specific interest in the rearmament of the same individual twenty-seven Member States: to defend themselves from whom or what? Even more so when, in the year 2012, the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

To date, the situation that has emerged with the Trump administration would seem to leave very little space (or perhaps none) for any potential negotiating power of the European Union in the definition of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Ukraine would seem to find itself in the position of having to give up Russia's conquests on the battlefield. Joe Biden (and with him the European Union) had a precise setting: that of diplomatically isolating Russia and, no less importantly, involving the Ukrainians in every decision concerning any negotiation on the fate of their country.

Donald Trump seems to have erased this determination at the very moment in which he seems to have wanted to seek a confrontation on the future of the entire conflict directly with Vladimir Putin, placing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj in a secondary position. Perhaps, before thinking about rearmament or a common defense, it would be necessary to reflect on the circumstance that the current geopolitical panorama could be the starting point for thinking about building the foundations to reach the constitution of the "United States of Europe", that is, a political formation in which individual Members should renounce their national sovereignty to become an integral and conscious part of an authentic European Federation.

Giuseppina Di Salvatore – Lawyer, Nuoro

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