Three days destined to leave their mark on the diplomatic field. They began yesterday with the brief but very important visit of the US Secretary of State and his Defense Colleague to Kyiv. They will continue tomorrow with the Pentagon chief’s delicate mission in Germany for a real war council with the European allies, which is also a kind of testament to the effective ability US President Joe Biden will have to lead countries that are partial unruly on the road he indicated. Tomorrow also begins the mission of UN Secretary-General Guterres, who will go first to Ankara (where the Turkish president is trying to revive himself as a mediator between Putin and Zelensky), then to Moscow and finally to Kyiv.
For the President of Ukraine, the arrival of Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin in his capital has enormous significance. For it is now apparent that it is the White House that is driving the Western anti-Russian response in defense of Ukraine, that its strategy is aimed at defeating Putin militarily, and that those in charge of diplomacy and the United States armed forces would never expose themselves. that way, if they hadn’t already decided to go through with it. As of this writing, that means American weapons for the Ukrainian army, which will be used in what military analysts call three to four weeks crucial to the fate of this war – fighting for survival against the Russian invaders on the eastern and southern fronts.
On the eve of the visit, Zelenskyi made it clear: We asked Biden for a sufficient supply of weapons tailored to our needs, especially in the Donbass, and we expect that his ministers will not turn up in Kyiv empty-handed. Blinken missed no reference to the Orthodox Easter before landing, and while Putin (who had rejected the request for an Easter truce) shares a war line with Moscow Patriarch Kirill, he instead expressed his admiration for the resilience of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church he wished them “hope and a speedy return to peace”.
However, the most complicated knots will have to be dealt with at Ramstein, the largest US air force base in Europe. Tomorrow, the head of the Pentagon Austin, along with the representatives of the thirty NATO countries and a dozen others, including Sweden and Finland, who, despite Putin’s threats, are preparing to submit an application for membership in the Atlantic Alliance, the availability of allied Europeans to contribute to the joint effort to properly arm Ukraine. It’s a tricky move that risks friction or even rupture, because if eastern NATO allies are aligned with Washington, the heavier “heavy” western allies might instead respond with fear and perplexity to the call for a more open one Accelerate confrontation with fly. As if that weren’t enough, Austin will bring the issue of post-conflict relations with Kyiv to the table in an equally complex and crucial way, primarily because it will compel those who may envision a return to more or less normal relations with Vladimir Putin appear.
Finally the UN chapter and mediation attempts. Guterres will be in Ankara tomorrow with Erdogan, who has meanwhile phoned Zelenskyy and once again offered his good offices to resume dialogue with Moscow. A dialogue that, according to the Financial Times, Putin would not believe in at all because he “sincerely believes in the nonsense of his own propaganda” and prefers to win big on the ground by permanently occupying as much Ukrainian territory as possible. After Ankara, Guterres is expected in the Kremlin and finally in Kyiv. A sequence that irritated Zelenskyy very much, according to which the UN number one should have come to him first: The war and the dead are here in Ukraine, he recalled.