If an analogy between the strange war in Ukraine and other historical events is legitimate, it should not be sought in the precedent of Gdansk, as the Polish Tusk and its Baltic coryphaeus would like, but in the inextricable political knots that dragged the great powers into the First World War . If we want to try to understand the growing dramatization of the clash with Russia we must start from two concepts recently highlighted by Pope Francis and Henry Kissinger. Expressing a complex idea with a simple image, the Pope warned that a world war is already underway, but that it is not perceived because it is "fragmented". For Kissinger, in the current historical phase, "the international order is faced with a paradox: its prosperity depends on the success of globalization, but the globalization process unleashes a political reaction that often ends up hindering its aspirations ”.
We could say that we are experiencing a "network" and "network" conflict that we cannot interpret with the traditional concepts of nation, of confrontation between powers, of blocs, of values and even of victory and defeat. Globalization has dissolved the perimeter of political power, essentially national, without the emergence of new institutional, juridical, cultural forms capable of constituting adequate structures to govern it. No wonder Putin and the Russian ruling class experience the dissolution of the USSR as a great historical tragedy. It meant the downgrading of Russia to a regional power squeezed between Europe and the United States in the west and the emerging power of China in the east.
Russia essentially depends on the export of raw materials, especially energy, and needs technologies to exploit them and increase its competitiveness. Putin knows that the energy monopoly is precarious and the resources it draws from it are destined to shrink and that the Russian economy is complementary and asymmetrical with respect to that of the EU and China. All this has simultaneously brought back the atavistic syndrome of encirclement and the historic imperial vocation: two elements that have always embodied the strategic orientation of the Russian ruling classes. The EU and the United States, albeit with different motivations, have made the mistake of mistaking Russian political and economic weakness for resignation to a subordinate role, forcing the timing of EU enlargement, expanding the NATO action and introducing into political relations ideological and moral elements that could not be understood.
The conflict in Ukraine brought all these contradictions to fruition. The international economic crisis was triggered by the economic and political conflicts of interest between Moscow, Kiev, the EU and Washington and between Ukrainian and Russian nationalism. The international significance of these events has been underestimated and misinterpreted by the EU – also due to pressure from Poland, the Baltic countries and other Eastern European states – and by the United States. The interest of Europe and Italy is certainly not to erect walls or to go to war with Russia, nor, even less, to give in to the pressure of the Ukrainian and pro-Russian extremists and to Moscow's acts of force. Putin knows that he cannot and would not like to occupy Ukraine and that his only real option is to obtain its transformation into a Federal State within the framework of a new set-up of economic and political relations with the EU and the States United.
The NATO summit in Newport certified that different approaches remain between European states and on the part of the United States, but that there is no alternative to this political line and the start of negotiations between Poroschenko and Putin proves it. Italy and the EU need to work on this objective, with the awareness that it is a complex, long-term strategy full of obstacles. In order to pursue it, it is urgent to promote a new structure of the EU, with a "variable geometry", with a nucleus of countries, willing to accelerate the process of political integration and to ensure it a more stable and homogeneous guide.
