Official information indicated that one million people mobilized for the great Victory Parade over Nazism, on Monday in Moscow. It is so much more noticeable and important the only control the western newspaper recorded, that General Vassyly Gerasimov, chief of staff of the armed forces and united as considered the most important man of the military in Russia, was the mastermind of the strategies and the reorganization of the army in the last ten years.

Don’t forget that Gerasimov is, along with President Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Serguei Shoigu, the member of the trio who holds the keys and buttons together to make it work. the attack device with atomic weapons.

Where is Gerasimov? He was left for dead and then wounded and has since disappeared because no one saw him, when he went to the Ukrainian east to push and refine the offensive to seize the Donbas region.

Balance of war

Until now the results for Putin were sad and they were reflected in his speech, despite the patriotic print running, which lacked success that seemed inevitable.

It achieved nothing more important in the war than destruction. Russia is neither safer nor richer, as an American diplomat summed it up.

It needs the victory of the Donbas, the richest region of Ukraine, which borders Russia’s border to the east. There are two small Russophile republics incorporated into the Russian Federation.

General Gerasimov must have been there, and if instead he had been at his command post in Moscow, he would have been busy with the same thing: seize the Donbas, finish the rest of the resistance in Mariupol after more than two months of siege.

The successful offensive became an essential necessity, important because the war was also fought across the Ukrainian and Russian borders, in the world of financial, commercial and social traffic.

The correctness of the penalties

Where Putin reaped a yes the worst defeat of his life: the sanctions of the United States and European countries, the threatening key to their progressive slowdown.

The penalties until the big parade in Moscow on Monday, were 10,128, according to a compilation by the Duma, the Russian Parliament. A real avalanche.

“There has never been so much in history,” commented Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin. As of February 24, when the invasion of Ukraine began, the sanctions were 2,724, mostly for the annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and other related stages. In this two -and -a -half -month war, 7,374 were added and continued. Soon to be approved by the European Union sixth package of penalties.

Putin continued the counterattack announcing “trade restrictions with enemy countries”, which he approved of sanctions.

Transactions and agreements “with foreign individuals and legal entities subject to restrictions” will be prohibited. In addition, the export of raw materials and products from Russia “in the interest of these individuals” is prohibited.

Moscow announced that in a few days will be announced the lists of people punished and companies, as well as the criteria for determining the operations subject to the ban.

Of course interest is concentrated in the energy sectorwith an embargo on Russia’s oil purchases.

Russia’s sanctions will intersect with a sixth package of sanctions from 27 European Union countries, delayed by hot discussion inside on the most burning issue: Russia’s oil embargo, on which much of Western Europe depends.

The EU package also contains a very important financial penalty: the exclusion from the Swift system of bank transactions Sberbank, Russia’s main bank, which handles a uniform share of transactions. Two other banks in Russia are also not included.

The position of Hungary

Until now, strong opposition by Hungary’s president, Viktor Orban, has hindered the approval of the package of measures.

Orban, who has permanent litigation in the EU for his undemocratic decisions and his closeness to Putin, does not give his consent and as European regulations require unity, in fact the Hungarian strongman has paralyzed the European Union in a dramatic moment.

The two most vulnerable countries are Hungary and Slovakia. The other affected are smaller states that can be helped without major problems. The solution is to allow exceptions for the transition that allow it to continue receiving Russian oil until 2023.

But Orbán insists Hungary needs at least five years and more funds to renovate and rebuild the refineries. A serious problem is its lack of access to the sea. The tug-of-war needs to be resolved immediately because time is running out.

Shakes in the European Union

The destabilization caused by the war decided by the president of Russia is so great that the problems are growing and compounding.

The current head of the European Union, French President Emmanuel Macron, has proposed to amend the European Union Treaty to adapt it to the new era.

Among other things, he proposed abandoning the standard of unity in decisions on social, fiscal and foreign policy issues, which implements a majority vote. Liquidate vetos once and for all, as in Hungary. Thirteen out of twenty -seven countries have declared themselves against it.

Stop Putin’s funding of Russia and its war with Ukraine of mountains of dollars and euros, which European countries pay every day for oil and gas supplied by the Russians, is the most important and urgent issue, because it has largely sterilized the penalties.

The United States wants a quality step away from the European Union on new sanctions against Moscow. The Treasury Department already launched its own sanctions in April for put Putin’s Russia closer to defaultwhich is the inability to honor debts.

The most important measure is a scheme that prevents the Russian government from paying its obligations using the current accounts of US banks.

The goal is to make Moscow more inaccessible to its foreign reserves, which total 600 billion dollars, which have been frozen by at least fifty percent because of past sanctions.

The method is important because the Russian government pays US bank JP Morgan as a “correspondent bank” and thus uses a complex mechanism. On the scale of the Treasury Department, the facilities were shut down.

A government spokesman explained that the decision “aims to push Moscow to choose what to do with the dollars to which it has free access: whether to pay off its debts or whether to use them for other purposes. , such as those associated with war. “

In this way, Russia is forced to use its internal dollar reserves, from the billions it receives daily from European countries to pay for its high dependence on Russia’s oil and gas. The proposal also underscores the urgency for the European Union to end as soon as possible an unbearable situation of funding Putin’s war by Europeans.

The British government has also announced a new package of trade sanctions against Russia and Belarus.. It imposes higher import duties on precious metals such as platinum and palladium, and prohibits exports to Russia’s manufacturing and heavy industries.

“This package of sanctions will cause further damage to the Russian war machine,” said British Secretary of State for International Trade Anne-Marie Treveyan.

Rome, correspondent

CB