Photo: US Embassy Kiev Ukraine
Destruction in Ukraine after bombings
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“Countries don’t have friends, they have interests”. To understand the war in Ukraine, you need to remember this phrase. The conflict,
who will be one year old this Friday (24),
with Russian protagonism but with important supporting actors on the international stage.
While many believe that Russia only intended to take Ukraine’s lands, it is inconceivable that trade deals and campaign promises colluded with the start of the conflict, which in fact did not start in 2022.
When we Brazilians ask when the war in Ukraine started, the answer is February 24, 2022. Ukrainians believe that the dispute began in 2014 with Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
But to understand the conflict, we have to go back much earlier, to November 9, 1989 to be precise. The date is traditionally marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall, which separated East and West Germany. However, the day is considered the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet empire.
While the Russians tried to find alternatives for development, the United States and the European Union prepared a number of conditions for the Soviets. Among them was the independence of several countries that formed the bloc, including Ukraine.
The then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who died last year, even yielded to pressure from the West, but conditioned the spaces to the nonadmission of a country that was part of the Soviet Union to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). . To grant the request, Russia would be responsible for the security of Ukrainians and other countries of the former Soviet Union, meaning it would have to watch over neighboring territory and undertake not to launch attacks against the country.
“This document stated that East Germany became West Germany and that none of the then socialist republics would join NATO, specifically Georgia, Moldova and mainly Ukraine. These regions were used by Nazi and Napoleonic troops to invade Russia,” explains Leonardo Trevisan, Professor of International Relations at ESPM.
“Ukraine would never join NATO to protect the Russian border,” he adds.
But Western interests kept growing. The United States was closing in on Poland, one of the countries hardest hit by World War II. From there it is Budapest memorandum
Document signed in 1994, which guaranteed the independence of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, obliged the supply of nuclear weapons from these countries to Russia and prevented the accession of countries that were part of the Soviet Union to NATO was not respected entry of Poland into NATO.
The fact is that Russia did not care much about the case. Since Poland does not share a border with Russia, there was no need to worry about establishing a US military base on Polish soil.
Ukraine’s rapprochement with the West
Russian President Vladimir Putin was delighted when his candidate won the 2010 election campaign in Ukraine. Putin saw Viktor Yanukovych as an opportunity to get control of Ukraine’s actions and prevent the country from rapprocheting with the United States.
Four years later, Yanukovych signed several proRussian measures, which angered proWestern Kievans. Russian aid did not prevent the Ukrainian parliament from ousting Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to another country while in office, and calling new elections.
Days after the fall of the Ukrainian government, the Russian army stepped in and stationed troops in Crimea, a military region important to the Soviets. According to Putin, the new government’s possible rapprochement with the United States could lead to an invasion of Russia.
“Ukraine had no army. She had armed forces only on paper. They didn’t need them because the Budapest Memorandum guaranteed the country’s security from the Russians,” says Gunther Rudzit, Professor of International Relations at ESPM.
Photo: Reproduction / CNN
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy seeks Western support to confront Russia
“Starting in 2014, Ukraine started to create an army, but there was little money to build something solid,” he adds.
The victor, Petro Poroshenko, aligned himself with the wishes of the West, inflicting a severe defeat on Putin. With the rapprochement between Poroshenko and then US President Barack Obama, Putin felt cornered and saw the relationship as a threat to admit Ukraine into NATO.
The Kremlin began to act behind the scenes and began making veiled threats of invasion, but without taking any effective action. It was another link in the chain that triggered the conflicts.
Trade deal and China in the “pie”
The departure of Proshenko and the arrival of Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the head of Ukraine greatly worried Putin. The Russian President never accepted Ukraine’s independence and could not tolerate any links between the country and the United States. Zelenskyy was a threat.
“The Russians never accepted the independence of Ukraine with the end of the Soviet Union. Never. They had to swallow that. Russia needed loans from the IMF (International Monetary Fund) with the end of the Soviet Union and the condition for receiving the money is the independence of countries , especially Ukraine,” explains Gunther.
Negotiations, meetings and agreements were examined. The European Union wanted more freedom of negotiation and found an opportunity in China to import cheaper technology. The United States, on the other hand, saw Ukraine’s interests as an opportunity to reach Europe.
In recent years, the European bloc struck trade deals with the Chinese, provoking a strong demonstration from the United States, which would lose its sales and consequently its jobs. The North American protest provoked a withdrawal from the European Parliament, but 26 countries opted to sign individual deals with the Chinese government.
“In 2020, the European Union began to conclude technological agreements with China and got much closer to the Chinese than to the Americans. The United States didn’t like this story at all. Europe continued to grow by buying more oil and gas from the Russians, while the US lost money on the deals,” explains Leonardo Trevisan.
In view of the consequences, the United States began to broker Ukraine’s entry into NATO. That sparked a series of threats from Vladimir Putin, who had begun moving his troops through Belarus to Ukraine’s eastern border and north.
“The Americans manipulated a lot and put pressure on the European Parliament to refuse this agreement. But some countries have signed individual treaties with the Chinese, which has raised alarms in the White House. From then on, the Americans provoked about Ukraine for the country to join NATO. For Russia, this is the same as placing Russian arms in Cuba,” says Trevisan.
Photo: Montage iG / Images: Kiara Worth and the Kremlin
Experts warn that once the war began in Ukraine, Biden had interests
Days before the start of the war in Ukraine, Prime Minister Olaf Scholz traveled to Moscow to persuade Putin to hold back his army. The Russian even accepted the troop withdrawal, but wanted a signal from the US that there was no possibility of integrating NATO into the western military alliance.
Trevisan Account Scholz made a point of calling Joe Biden, the President of the United States, who clearly said the conflict would take place.
“When Scholz called Biden and said he had an agreement with the Russians, the German heard a resounding ‘No’. Biden didn’t want that, he really wanted a problem because Europe had gotten closer to the Chinese,” he says. .
Biden’s speech is for a reason. With Ukraine’s backing of the EU, Russia would impose sanctions on westerners while delivering on a campaign promise: to restore jobs in the country’s oil and gas sector.
“One of Biden’s campaign promises is that he would save jobs in the oil region of the United States. He has said several times that the working class in Pennsylvania can rest assured that jobs will be restored. Promise,” he adds.
Mistakes, mistakes and more mistakes
If there is a protagonist in the Ukraine war, then this role is that of “error”. No, you didn’t read it wrong.
All countries’ analyzes were wrong, resulting in defeats for Russia, the European Union, Ukraine and the United States.
The North Americans thought that Europe would succumb to their charms, but it suffered severe pressure and had to provide money and arms to the Ukrainians. For its part, the European Union expected Putin to abandon the idea and maintain the agreement on the distribution of natural gas.
Ukraine was mistaken that it would receive support from the armies of other countries, although it had the support of guns and tanks. Russia, on the other hand, was wrong in assuming that the Ukrainians would not resist and that the conflict, as in Georgia in 2008, would last only three days.
“Russia’s first mistake was to imagine that US interests in Ukraine are only interests in Ukraine.
“China also made a mistake in its analysis of events. It looked only at its commercial interests and did not attach any importance to Ukraine the Kremlin would be enough,” analyzes Leonardo Trevisan.
the future of war
The journalist Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has already warned against this. The second year has to be the bloodiest of them all.
Vladimir Putin’s signals reached new heights this week. The Russian president has broken the nuclear weapons control treaty and has threatened to use warheads if the United States begins research into weapons with high destructive potential.
Matching Putin’s record with international reactions will only exacerbate the conflict, experts believe. However, it can be observed that the cooperation of the West is having an effect.
“One cannot say when the war will end, but I find one point interesting. It is clear from the press that Russia has been weakened and that the Ukrainian army has advanced against Putin’s attacks,” stresses Gunther.
“But this conflict must not reach nuclear proportions. Russia has a large number of warheads and could do even more damage if it did so.
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