https://www.clarin.com/mundo/zelenski-washington-good-morning-ukraine-_0_MtzUTATEv5.html

Three hundred days after the start of the war in Ukraine, this week’s historic visit by Volodimir Zelensky to the United States emerges as a likely first step in shaping your way out of that conflict. If so, the most complex chapter of this nightmare would begin to take shape.

The appointment is full of signals. The Ukrainian president told Congress that Republicans reluctant to continue with automatic support for Kiev will now be scrutinized in his lower house. But the closeness to Joe Biden was one clear message to the autocrat Vladimir Putin and the rest of the Kremlin leaders.

The US president, reassured about his leadership after the results of the recent midterm elections, underlined the depth of the alliance with his Ukrainian colleague, warning that the US will “everything within our reach” and repeated everything, to ensure the Ukrainian victory.

Washington has already committed $50 billion to the conflict so far. Ukraine calls for more aid from another 45 billion to “help us defend our values ​​and our independence,” Zelensky tells lawmakers like a World War II Churchill pleading with Roosevelt under Nazi bombing.

This alliance displayed in such a showcase is a complex challenge for Putin, trapped as he is in the failed development of the war and the political attrition that accompanies that failure. NATO assistance was the worst torment for a military force that, to the surprise of the world, found itself stuttering and scattered.

bad Russian timing

A recent report by The New York Times indicated, with testimonies from Russian soldiers, the absence on the front of strategies, maps, but also ammunition, shelter, food and even modern weapons among the troops, recently constituted by a violent withdrawal that outraged Putin’s subjects who first voice they noticed the war.

The Kremlin leader has taken this military action as the first big step for the reconstruction of the Russian Empire. An architecture intended for his neighborhood that would be corroborated in an executive way only if the conflict were counted in days and the victory, thus, vigorous.

During the months of confrontation and through his own speeches, Putin made it clear that, far from using the pretext of the NATO threat as a trigger for the conflict, he envisaged control of Ukraine as the instrument for amplify your skills and extend your possibilities.

In other words, reinventing Russia as a governing nation of that space, a necessary condition to get out of the position of medium-sized economy, limiting its global strategy.

Finally, the intention was that Russia, in its alliance with China, and even more than China, would return to a inevitable position in the world equilibria, as in the times of the east-west axis of the last century. None of this, we know, was realistic.

By reaffirming their alliance with Zelensky, Biden and his fellow Ukrainian would be signaling to the Russian leader that he has lost enough, gained too little, and what comes next could be even more humiliating. He returns to that teaching of De Gaulle regarding the fact that the enemy must not be defeated but convince him that he has lost. The ideal of a Russia forced to withdraw but not disintegrated.

“War is inherently unpredictable,” warn two academics in an insightful article on Foreign Affairs: “Putin’s last battle, the promise and danger of Russian defeat”. (Putin’s last stand. The promise and danger of Russian defeat).

While it’s impossible to rule out a change in fortunes, the authors, Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage, say it seems clear “that Russia is heading towards defeat”. They observe that while this seems certain, it is much less clear “what form this defeat would take”.

It is likely that Zelensky spoke with Biden about the format of an eventual post-war period or how all players would emerge from this confinement. It is not clear that a definition of this magnitude would take place with Putin in charge. This is because the Kremlin leader has been a maximalist since the beginning of this adventure last February, with a messianic vision according to which without everything there is nothing.

So Washington’s message would go beyond the Kremlin leader to an angry Russian establishment that is capitalizing nothing on this conflict and is instead confronted with a prospect of a decline that must also stop to preserve national pride, no less a point.

A paradox appears. The regime’s top-down approach makes it impossible to identify a solid successor, but even if he were an anti-Western leader, as is likely, they should be taken advantage of by Russia’s current enemies so that their control and that of the country is assured.

bath of realism

In this sense, the meeting in Washington may have been a bath of realism for Zelenski as well. There will be losses for your country in building a way out of the conflict. Kiev, depending on the depth of the Russian debacle, could partially or completely recapture Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia. But unlikely to recapture Crimea seized by Putin in 2014.

As Henry Kissinger said at the time, there is the port of Sevastopol, where the main base of the Russian navy is based and it is from there that that power can project for the Mediterranean.

It also glosses over Kissinger’s warning that a weakened Russia would be over devoured by the Chinese spider web which, beyond the current serious difficulties, continues to be a full power with development prospects.

Furthermore, a Russian collapse would generalize an effect of enormous disorder in the region it controls, freeing the hands of countries such as Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey which also has reveries of imperial restorations with Ottomanism.

This is why it pursues NATO member Greece and asserts itself without geopolitical bias in the South Caucasus, until recently Russia’s untouchable backyard. Azerbaijan, a Turkish satellite country, has blocked for days nothing less than the crucial corridor towards the Armenian territory of Nagorno Karabagh, with serious humanitarian damage.

In a Russia that would eventually collapse, other serious questions would also arise, such as the fate of its nuclear arsenals.

The schema of the analysts cited three possible scenarios out of this crisis. One, of a negotiated sandbox, in which the Russian government keeps Crimea and leaves the other territories, keeping up the appearance of its weakness with the argument that it was NATO and not Ukraine that led the war.

Another, serious, that there is no breath and Putin “prolongs the war in a nihilistic way” while sabotaging Kyiv’s allied countries. Even with the use of the atomic bomb with the consequences that would ensue.

Finally a third, unpredictable with the total defeat that would occur due to an internal rebellion that would bring down the regime, producing the automatic end of the war, as happened in 17 when the Bolsheviks seized powerthey crushed the Tsar’s court and retreated from the first fire of the last century.

These speculations, which fall within the realm of the possible, matter because predict the end of an era. They fly over that idea that multiplies among the observers. There are no chances in sight for the Russian leader to reverse this trend, although we don’t know to date how it will be defined or what the fate of the character will be.

It has been said that the figure of Machiavelli has never been extraneous to Putin. The Florentine rightly warned that a prince who is not interested in the art of war, his effectiveness, can never be appreciated by his soldiers. “Don’t even trust them.” Almost a glimpse of this present.

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