Vladimir Putin He dedicated a good part of the four and a half hours of his speech reviewing the year to calling crazy all those who feed fear of Russia and insist that the Kremlin’s idea is to attack Europe and NATO within a period of no more than five years.
The rest of the time he spent threatening Europe itself and NATO itself with an open war if Russia was not treated “with respect” and if the geopolitical clumsiness of isolating Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave located between Lithuania and Poland, was committed.
“If such threats are made against us, we will destroy them. Such actions will simply lead to an unprecedented escalation of the conflict, take it to a completely different level and expand it into a full-scale armed conflict,” he declared.
In other words, yes, Russia is prepared for a war with Europe and not even this is new, since Putin himself stated it last month for anyone who would listen to him.
Of course, the verbal escalation itself is already worrying. In recent weeks, we have gone from more or less distant hypotheses to statements of Mark Rutte stating that we had to be prepared for “a great war, like the one our grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought” and the last two warnings from Putin already mentioned.
Fear in the Baltics
Those who feel this escalation the most are the Baltic countries. Their governments have long acted as if the Russian invasion was inevitable and know that they will be the first with whom Putin will test true commitment to NATO’s famous Article 5 of mutual support in case of attack.
As the former National Security Advisor said this Thursday, John Boltonreferring to promises to Ukraine, “if Trump doesn’t believe in NATO Article 5, how can he believe in guarantees similar to those in Article 5?”
Obviously, the Europeans are not going to blockade Kaliningrad. Another thing would be a false flag attack that justified armed action, but Putin does not even know how he is doing in the armed action that he already undertook four years ago, to start another one.
In his speech he again referred to Kupiansk, this time to say that it is about to fall. Just a month ago, he assured that he had already fallen. Is it possible that an army that fails to break the siege of a destroyed city in eastern Kharkiv would dare to challenge the entire West? It would have to be seen.
On December 12, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrovdemanded that Finland leave NATO, an organization that it did not enter until 2023, when it saw its neighbor’s beards peel off.
Recently, imperialist discourses have been revived around certain territories close to the Republic of Karelia, a region that the Finns had to cede to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War.
Likewise, pressure continues to grow on Estonia, where the Government denounced the illegal incursion of three Russian soldiers, in what can only be understood as a new act of provocation.
The soldiers walked near the Narva River for about twenty minutes, after which they returned to their country. In a context of extreme tension between Russia and its neighboring members of the Atlantic Alliance, it is difficult to think of a casual act.
French President Emmanuel Macron during the meeting this Thursday in Brussels
Macron asks Europe to talk to Putin
For his part, the French president, Emmanuel Macronsurprised this Friday with public statements in which he urged Europe to talk to Putin again and resume negotiations directly with the Kremlin in the coming weeks.
The reason Macron gave was that right now it is others – in clear reference to the United States – who are talking to Russia and that leaves Europe out of the equation.
The French president believes that the only way in which the old continent can regain the momentum of the negotiations is by speaking directly with Moscow. Otherwise, in his words, “we just talk to each other” without any progress.
Macron already called Putin over the diplomatic wall around the Russian leader last July. The conversation was harshly criticized both inside and outside France and, honestly, it was of no use.
Right now, Putin understands that his only interlocutor is Donald Trumpwho is in charge of doing his dirty work on the diplomatic front. Hence, the US president insisted this Friday that Ukraine must “move quickly” with territorial issues, since Russia “is already doing so.”
Trump is obvious that the only thing Russia has to do is occupy the lands that, supposedly, Ukraine has to give it up in exchange for nothing. And yet, formally, Putin has never stated that the “peace for territories” model satisfies him. Before, on the contrary.
In his end-of-year talk, Putin repeated everything that his Western propagandists insist on omitting: the causes of the conflict go far beyond this or that province and have to be solved. Until they do so and fully comply with Russian demands, there will be no peace in Ukraine. He even knows that Steve Witkoff. And, if you don’t know, you have to understand that Jared Kushner He must have explained it to her on one of their joint trips.