Tomorrow Putin will return to sit, albeit virtually, among the world’s greats. In fact, the Russian president will attend his first G20 summit after the invasion of Ukraine, convened via teleconference by the current president, India’s Modi. This is certainly a step that breaks the absolute isolation from the West in which Putin, whose boss also has an arrest warrant from the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, has been in for two years. And that in itself is not bad news in terms of the possibility of finding a common solution to the ongoing crisis.
It is no secret that something is moving in this direction, experts link their cautious optimism to the US elections next year, which will force the two challengers – Biden and Trump or whoever the Democrats and Republicans ultimately run – to do so , to say something final and possibly decisive on this issue already in the election campaign. I can already imagine our local pro-Putinists raising their glasses to the return of the tsar and casting this as a defeat of Western pro-Ukraine policy, when it is exactly the opposite. In fact, it is the military stalemate that has emerged on the ground thanks to the NATO bloc’s enormous help to Zelensky’s army that is allowing diplomacy to take the field, and tomorrow’s appointment is a concrete first signal of possible dialogue.
It is now clear that neither competitor will win this war in any technical sense: the Ukrainian people are exhausted and certainly unable to push the Red Army back across the border while the Russians have wreaked such human and political havoc around to prevent any possibility of annexation of Ukraine in the future, even in the event of the enemy’s surrender. Maybe that’s exactly why Putin is trying to get back in the game, to save what can be saved from a failed military operation that on paper was only supposed to last a few weeks and which instead took the path of “never ending the war.” . .
However this story ends, one thing is already clear: Ukraine and the West have not bowed to the law that those who have more tanks can dispose of those who have fewer at will. This is no small feat, on the contrary, it is a victory in itself.