The challenge of winter in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict
Moscow (AsiaNews) - After a climatically anomalous and tormented summer, a new factor is about further complicate the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation: the long cold winter that will soon begin. In the midst of sanctions and counter-sanctions, as the world waits to see who will be most affected economically and politically, the people from both countries increasingly concerned with the pressing issue of the imminent winter.
Even if clement weather persists in Ukraine for another month or so, allowing people to get away with a light jumper or woolen blanket, sooner or later they will need to turn on the heating, and every burning patriotic flame is in danger of dying out like a candle in the wind.
Moreover, even the famous October Revolution began in February with the riots in the streets toyed with the Provisional Government in the summer, and died out with the first snowfall, in the assault on the Winter Palace.
Of course, the "separatists" in the occupied areas will be the first to be freeze and the people with them. Caravans of "humanitarian aid" from Moscow will prove useless, as will the trucks and troops that follow in their wake. All the rest of Ukraine - regardless of the outcome of the fighting in Lugansk and Donetsk - knows that the gas for the heaters will be rationed - at best for a few hours a day - and understand that an ironclad timetable will have to be established for time spent in and out of the house.
In Russia itself, people are already sealing windows against drafts, hoping to hold what little warmth was left by an ungrateful summer until spring. And all this in the hope that the "war of sanctions" will not go beyond the current limits, to avoid having to ration even the basic necessities. At a time when families are struggling across the continent Western Europe also fears seeing its energy resources reduced, although to a lesser extent.
In short, the real crisis has yet to begin. The fighting in the eastern territories of Ukraine may eventually be solved by more or less permanent truce, but no one is under the illusion that everything will go back to the way it was before. The real, dramatic and obvious effect of the conflict, is that it has ended any hopes of integration between the East and the West, of Europe and the world.
Economists from most countries, apart from the ever present Cassandras who predict doomsday scenarios, are in a state of protracted bewilderment: the global market, the salvific free trade, for which the Majdan revolution was born, is at an impotent impasse without any visible remedies.
Russia is tempted by increasing political isolation to stake everything on national pride and elephantiasis, seen in its increase in the production of goods for domestic consumption, and increased presence in Asian markets. A German-led Europe is yo-yoing between fear of losses due to the sanctions against Russia and the mild-American promises of energy compensation, on condition of military support from the resistant Europeans, who have become the least warlike race on the planet.
The United States is grappling with a continuing loss of prestige and geopolitical power, as well as an indecisive Obama who is being increasingly penned in by the "hawks" inside and outside of his own party, not to mention those of the establishment. The include the ultra-liberals of the Tea Parties, who want America freed of all military and economic conditioning. The Asian Tigers are patiently waiting for the corpses to wash up on the river banks, for their moment. Everyone speaks of a future under China, but it could also prove to be a chimera.
The point is that globalization, the final triumph of historical capitalism on all forms of socialism, harbors an obvious contradiction. Capital needs conflict, competition and confrontation. The conflict is no longer that of Hegel and Marx, between masters and servants, because in the third millennium, everyone is now masters of something, and the servant of all. Composite and complex interests, which are often horizontal, are clashing. The competition is no longer based on entrepreneurship and advertising, but on continuous de-localization and restructuring, creating clusters of economic forces that often secretly cooperate with each other, instead of seeking to supersede each other.
The geographical and ideological conflicts have given way a reactionary localism, which seems to harken a return to the Middle Ages: who remembers the existence of an independent Scotland or Catalonia or of the Ukraine, to limit ourselves to Europe? Certainly not the people who revolt or are passionate about a cause that perhaps never existed, such as Northern Italy's Po Valley or Putin's Novorossija.
Opposition gives in to folklore and nostalgia, such as the Caliphate of Al-Baghdadi which evokes the times of Saladin, the Hungarian nationalism of Viktor Orban, the Hungarian version of Putin, or the neo-Ottoman policy of the Sultan Erdogan. The dreams of restoration are often accompanied by a somewhat distorted religious inspiration: the Islam of terror and homophobic Orthodoxy are often accompanied by fundamentalist Catholics, Evangelicals, Hindus and Buddhists, all capable of allying themselves to wars of conquest against modernity and against the institutions. Putin himself has admirers in America and in Europe, where many consider him the new Constantine, the only bulwark against the West's moral decay, or the new Alexander the Great, setting out to conquest Asia in order to save Greece.
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16/09/2023 09:00
