RUSSIA/UKRAINE PAST CONFLICTS

"FOR MOST OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY, the Soviet Union controlled Eurasia from East Germany to the Pacific, from the Caucasus to Hindu Kush. After 1991, Russia retracted its western border by nearly a thousand kilometers, from the West German border to the Belarus border. In this way, Moscow's power has receded to the east more than it ever had in the past.

After the breakup of the Soviet Empire, Kiev began its long, conflicted, non-straight march towards an alignment with Western Europe and the United States and a move away from Russia. This process represented a breaking point in Russian history. The recent coup in Ukraine was the moment when the post-Cold War period was finally over for the Russian Federation. The citizens of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Volgograd, Novgorod, Vladivostok have rightly interpreted the "revolution of Majdán Nezale?nosti" as the attempt by the United States to push Ukraine into NATO and, therefore, to prepare the ground for the definitive disintegration of Russia. as a Great Power.

If Washington really manages to firmly insert Ukraine into the Western bloc, Russia will automatically become indefensible. The southern border with the Belarus and the southwestern border would not, in fact, offer any obstacle to the entry of a potential invader. After witnessing this attempt to undermine the geostrategic foundations of Russian security, Moscow has returned with greater force to promote a strategy capable of reconstituting its historical sphere of influence in the regions of the former Soviet Union. Although the limit of the strategic interests of the largest Slavic nation will remain a matter of controversy for a long time, it is certain that the great retreat of the Derzhava (Russian Power) ended on the night of February 23-24, 2014, when a well-orchestrated coup d'état, allegedly carried out with the complicity of a part of the Western chancelleries, he ousted the pro-Russian president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovy?.

The United States and the countries of the old Warsaw Pact will certainly try to stop the Russian reconquest. But even if Russia fails to regain its status as a global power in the next decade, it will still struggle with all its might to remain at least a regional Great Power. And this cannot fail to lead to a conflict - "hot" or "cold" we will see - with NATO, the US administration and the Big Three of the European Union (Berlin, Paris, London). There[…]"

“The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and the Baltic States are in NATO, where Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine will also join tomorrow. Belarus is also at risk and when another spontaneous street uprising, or maneuvered like the one in Kiev, or alternatively a "palace revolution" will force Minsk to repudiate its loyalty to the Kremlin, a potential side against Moscow will be penetrated deeper into the heart of Russian territory than the armies of the Third Reich did during the "Great Patriotic War."

Pressed by the enormous economic and military difficulties, the new government in Kiev will hardly be able to escape its eternal destiny as a "puppet state", whose strings will be pulled this time by the White House and the Berlin Chancellery. If this government has the strength to survive and consolidate, Russia's position on the international stage will be that of a "chained giant" forced to defend itself without being able to attack or counterattack. Not even the threat of interrupting the supply of natural gas to Europe will allow it to remedy a situation of incurable and very serious strategic vulnerability. Then the future of Russia will be summed up in the one word that no nation would ever want to be forced to pronounce: "uncertainty Fair, peaceful and lasting. The Virgilian-Masonic inscription engraved in 1782 on the back side of the Great Seal of the United States of America (Novus Ordo Seclorum) once again regained all its prophetic value.

In the Middle East, after December 26, 1991, the dominance of the Sunni Powers (Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Egypt and Turkey linked to Washington by the desire to stabilize this region but also by opaque and unspeakable interests) guaranteed the success of the tactic of " double containment ?towards Iran and Iraq. In Asia, the US strategic preponderance was strengthened, the strength of which was ensured by a series of political-military cooperation pacts with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Indonesia and other minor allies. In Europe, the post-Cold War political-territorial settlement allowed the restoration of the unity of Germany, the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the integration of the former Warsaw Pact states and the Baltic Republics into NATO and the EU.

This historical phase now belongs to the past. With the revival of the imperial ambitions of China, India, Iran and Turkey, with the general destabilization of the Middle East, caused even more by the senseless US strategy in that region than by jihadist barbarism and, above all, with the vigorous resumption of activity in Moscow in all. Despite many limitations, due in large part to the still insufficient technological modernization of the Russian army and the weakness of an economy too dependent on the recycling of proceeds from the sale of energy, Vladimir Putin has reported considerable success in frustrating attempts Westerners to penetrate the post-Soviet space. After receiving, through gritted teeth, the searing humiliation of the defeat of Belgrade that led to the independence of Kosovo, the successor of Boris Yeltsin has definitively put an end to the Chechen conflict (which he demonstrated for the first time, after the collapse of the USSR, the will of the Russian Federation not to give up the dominion of its ancient imperial periphery) 2, disrupted Georgia, brought the government of Yerevan back into the orbit of Moscow, strengthened the role of the Organization of the Collective Security Treaty (signed by Russia , Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan), strengthened the bonds of friendship with China, Iran, India, Afghanistan, Syria and Serbia, maintained its grip on Crimea and, with the intervention in Ukraine, inflicted on the West a as unexpected as it was mortifying defeat.

This certainly positive balance can also be explained on the basis of the cultural differences that distinguish the Russian premier from his colleagues on the Euratlantic front. Unlike Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, David Cameron, Fran?ois Hollande and Indomitable that allows him to keep big and small opponents at bay. Too cynical, too disenchanted, too pervaded by the reasons of realpolitik, or perhaps simply too much moved by selfish love for his homeland, the new Tsar of the Kremlin also knows that none of Russia's current rivals would be willing to "die for Kiev ”after agreeing to die in vain for Baghdad and Kabul. And who knows if this earthly certainty is not combined with the metaphysical one of incarnating, as other "Little Fathers" of the Russian people did in the past centuries, the kathekon: "the power that slows down", in this case, the advent of full dominion of the Antichrist of globalization.

To give an objective judgment on the legitimacy of Putin's political-military response to the Kiev earthquake and its immediate and remote consequences, it must nevertheless be remembered that the greatest responsibility for the creation of the Ukrainian hoax belongs to the United States and Germany and subordinately to the other NATO "minority partners". And it's a long-term responsibility. The "march to the east" of the Atlantic Alliance took place, in fact, at the cost of a systematic tampering with the commitments entered into with Moscow before the German reunification.

In early 1990, West German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich [...] ""And Secretary of State James Baker, aware that the Soviets would not be willing to withdraw their forces from East Germany in the absence of sufficient guarantees for the future, formally declared that there would be" no expansion of the Atlantic Alliance eastward ?, After the reunification of the two Germanys, and ?evardnadze and Gorba??v assured that? never and under no circumstances could the jurisdiction of NATO and that of the European Union be extended to the nations of Eastern Europe ?"And Secretary of State James Baker, aware that the Soviets would not be willing to withdraw their forces from East Germany in the absence of sufficient guarantees for the future, formally declared that there would be" no expansion of the Atlantic Alliance eastward ?, After the reunification of the two Germanys, and ?evardnadze and Gorba??v assured that? never and under no circumstances could the jurisdiction of NATO and that of the European Union be extended to the nations of Eastern Europe. The latest credible attempt to tie Russia to Europe was pioneered by Fran?ois Mitterrand who in 1990 proposed "“Receiving the lukewarm support of Helmut Kohl, the creation of a? European Confederation ?inclusive of Moscow. The project was rejected by the State Department which, instead, supported the formation of a "strategic triangle", composed of the USA, Germany and France, dominated by Washington. The first decision taken by the triumvirate was to expand the functions of the OSCE: the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe which significantly counted Washington and Ottawa among its founders. The second was the strengthening of NATO, justified by the emergency caused by the Yugoslav wars of secession. The third led to the green light given to the hasty accession to the Atlantic Alliance of all the old European satellites of the USSR.

Even today, a possible solution to the Ukrainian crisis remains confined within this Euratlantic Directory which now rests mainly on the German-US axis. After the currents of the State Department, in favor of the rearmament of Kiev and its inclusion in NATO, suffered a temporary setback, Obama was forced to delegate the management of the crisis to Merkel who, under the cloak of an aggressive Atlanticist rhetoric, it seems to want to actually take steps to re-establish the threads of dialogue with Putin, albeit in the context of a transatlantic and no longer Eurocentric dimension. In the long ", The US opposition to a resumption of relations between Brussels and Moscow is destined, however, to remain unchanged. Just as Washington's will to sabotage the "Eurasian energy Rapallo" that still binds Russia and the European Union with firm and perhaps indissoluble knots with irrational maneuvers and disruptive actions will remain unaltered in the shortest period of time.

Present and past of the Ukrainian crisis

IT IS CERTAINLY TRUE THAT HISTORY NEVER REPEATS either as a "tragedy" or as a "farce". It is equally true, to take up the ancient dictum of Heraclitus, that it is not possible to bathe twice in the water of the river of past events unless you want to engage in a futile and misleading analogue exercise with which to try to interpret the present. in the light of the experience of what was. However, this rule has some exceptions. Even history knows about "constants", "repetitions", "recurrences" and these are caused by the memory of a people and by the geopolitical position of a nation that sometimes condemn peoples and nations to a tragic "eternal return" to past. Very often the progression of linear time fails to compress, in fact, "that dark depth of consciousness, where the fundamental feelings and indestructible persuasions of individual races, faiths, castes live and ferment; sentiments and persuasions which, apparently dead and buried, prepare for subsequent, distant times, unprecedented metamorphoses and catastrophes without which, apparently, peoples cannot exist.

The events in Ukraine constitute an important case study to verify the consistency of this" historical law "which contradicts the Enlightenment dogmas of absolute historicism2. After the triumph of the "second revolution of Kiev", Ukraine, with the overwhelming demographic weight of forty-six million inhabitants and with its seven hundred thousand square kilometers of extension that make it the second largest state in Europe, after European Russia , leaves the sphere of influence of Moscow and projects itself into the Euratlantic one. Today by signing the preliminaries for its entry into the European Union (together with Georgia and Moldova) and tomorrow by completing the path that will allow it to join NATO as the majority of the countries already members of the Warsaw Pact and the states that once part of the old communist bloc: Albania, Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and the Baltic states3. To determine this shift of field, widely foreseeable since 2012, was certainly a violent flashback of Ukrainian nationalism, an ancient, visceral, never dormant and certainly understandable (if not completely justified) russophobia, the irresistible attraction of elites towards the model of life of European liberal democracies, the choice of the Kiev "oligarchs" worried about being cut off from the speculative circle “Of the western financial market.

These sentiments, which concern the capital and a part of the western regions of the country, but not the south-eastern ones still strongly oriented towards Moscow by virtue of very strong and centuries-old historical, economic and linguistic ties, however, fail to fully explain what happened. Insisting exclusively on these factors means isolating the Ukrainian crisis from the geostrategic complexity in which it originated and where it developed and, therefore, speciously mystify its historical and political significance. The "glorious night" of 22-23 February 2014, which saw the deposition and flight of the "satrap" Viktor Janukovy? and the return to power of the controversial "Ukrainian Joan of Arc" Julija Tymoshenko, was Caused by strong pressure from the Berlin, Paris and Warsaw cabinets. The same international actors who, with suspicion, poor timing, had negotiated, through their foreign ministers, a political compromise between the legitimate government and the insurgents (elections and return to the "more liberal" constitution of 2004) when the situation was now completely out of control.

Donald Tusk's Poland, possessed by the ambition to restore the ancient supremacy over Lithuania, Belarus, part of Ukraine and Latvia, sanctioned by the Lublin Union of 1569 and survived until the third partition of the Polish state (1795), she was the staunchest supporter of Yanukovych's opponents. Backed by Hollande's France, which unscrupulously played the old nineteenth-century card of the "defense of oppressed nationalities" to keep alive what remains of its dusty grandeur, Warsaw, together with Sweden and the three Baltic Republics, have pushed more than any other country to favor an association agreement between Ukraine and the EU.

In the less flashy, but certainly more incisive, backstage of international diplomacy was the action of the United States and Germany. The Obama administration has been heavily involved in favoring the full integration of Ukraine into the US hegemonic (political-military-economic) system which, inaugurating a climate of "Competition with Moscow, deliberately defined by some American publications as the" New Cold War ", aims to extend from North Africa, to Egypt, to the Middle East, to the Caucasus, to Afghanistan, to the former Soviet Central Asia. A maneuver, this one, aimed at eliminating the centuries-old state of Great Power, hegemon between Europe and Asia, of Russia, formally claimed by Putin, in May 2014, with the birth of the Eurasian Economic Union, an association of cooperation and development, destined to enter into force in January 2015, which will be able to count on a common market of “One hundred and seventy million consumers and a combined gross domestic product worth nearly three trillion dollars.

On the occasion of the Ukrainian crisis, Germany assumed full leadership of Brussels foreign policy, establishing an axis with Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia (the anti-Russian "new Warsaw Pact"), harshly condemning the president-elect Janukovy? for having refused to join the "free trade zone" of the European Union and for having suppressed the protest of those sectors of Ukrainian society that opposed that denial. With the vigorous support of the "Ukrainian revolution", Angela Merkel's Germany has placed the last piece necessary for the construction of a large area of economic and political penetration extending from the Oder to the Baltic to the Danube, from the mouth of the Don to the Black Sea. Of this new "Great Game", Ukraine is certainly the most important pawn. It is so for the richness of its mineral resources (coal, iron ores, oil, huge untapped reserves of methane gas and oil derived from the crushing of the soil, shale gas and shale oil) 5 and agricultural (especially cereals). Resources that had aroused the interest of Beijing, which declared its willingness in September 2013 to sign an agreement for the acquisition of the exploitation “Of three million hectares of the very fertile Ukrainian 'black lands' and now unwilling to take sides on the anti-Russian front.

It is for the passage in its territory of about forty thousand kilometers of gas pipelines that connect it to Russia and the Caspian Sea area (Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan). On this huge artery, which meets the energy consumption of Europe and Turkey for 25-31 per cent (and Italy alone for 43 per cent), the West, after the fall of Janukovy?, has potentially extended its control . And this happened to coincide with the successful attempt by the US to prevent the construction of the South Stream gas pipeline project which, in analogy with the North Stream, projected between Russia “Repeat the centuries-old cycle of its opposition to Europe and the United States. The West must understand that Russia will never tolerate Ukraine becoming a foreign and potentially adverse country. Russian history began in Kievan Rus' and it is there that its religion was born. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries and their histories have intertwined even before then. Some of the most important battles for Russian freedom, since that of Poltava in 1709, have been fought on Ukrainian soil. The Black Sea Fleet - Russia's only means of accessing the Mediterranean - exists as an operational force only thanks to the long-term lease of Sevastopol in the Crimea. Even famous dissidents like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Iosif Brodsky have always insisted that Ukraine is an integral part of Russian history: indeed of Russia itself. The European Union must recognize that its bureaucratic slowness and the subordination of its internal and particular problems to the solution of the great strategic issues of a general nature, during the negotiations with Ukraine, have given rise to today's crisis. Foreign policy, in fact, is the art of establishing priorities. This is a lesson that the Europe of Brussels "It is far from having learned. In the current conjuncture, however, it is the Ukrainians who remain the decisive element. They belong to a land with a complex history, the scene of conflicts due to the existence of linguistic and religious barriers. Any attempt by Catholic and Ukrainian-speaking Ukraine to dominate the other Orthodox and Russian-speaking Ukraine will necessarily lead to civil war and the end of national unity. To consider Ukraine as part of the East-West confrontation, by pushing it to join NATO, would be tantamount to burying for decades any prospect of integrating Russia and the West - and in particular Russia and Europe - into a system of international cooperation. A wise US policy towards Ukraine should have sought ways to foster an understanding between the two parts of the country. America should have favored reconciliation and not, as it did, the domination and oppression of one faction over the other. Finally, for the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a political choice: it is only an alibi that dramatically denounces the absence of any choice "Inspired by the ancient Metternician political wisdom dear to Kissinger, who preached the priority defense of the balance of power relations, combining realpolitik and a strategy of détente8, the sensible advice of the Secretary of State of the Nixon administration was completely disregarded. Washington, Paris, London and a Germany, always oscillating between dialogue and closure with Moscow, did not limit themselves to trying to preserve the "Ukrainian diversity" (which a Russian historian, like Georgy Petrovich Fedotov, was able to grasp very well in 1947) from a new deadly embrace of the "Sarmatic Bear" promoting the "Finnishization" of what for centuries was not coincidentally called "Little Russia".

With the Friendship Pact signed between Moscow and Helsinki in 1948, Finland was forced by territorial contiguity with Russia to place itself in a position of rigid "non-alignment", which however did not exclude the obligation of mutual assistance in the event of external aggression of one of the two signatory states. Position for which the term "finlandization" was used, coined by the German political scientist Richard L?wenthal during the Berlin crisis and then destined to enter the current lexicon of the Cold War journalism. Normally this concept was understood in the negative sense of loss or serious limitation "Of the full sovereignty of Helsinki over Moscow, but not episodically it was also used to indicate a possible hypothesis of an alternative rearrangement of the world order sanctioned by the inter-allied summits of Tehran and Yalta which had given the green light to Russian expansionism.

Even until the end of the 1970s, for the majority of US analysts and politicians, all nations west of the "Iron Curtain" would be at risk of "finlandisation" if they succumbed to the temptation of disarmament and a separate agreement with the Russia. Yet even the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles - who was, between 1953 and "1959, one of the major supporters of the need for an active response to the threat of Bolshevik godless terrorism, to be realized through the creation of alliance systems between Washington and the capitals of the" free world ", in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Oceania - he argued that the "Finland model" could be fruitfully adopted in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia. If the Western bloc had pursued a strategy of close confrontation with the Communist one, on the propaganda, diplomatic and military level, it would have been able to force the Soviet Union to accept a balanced modification of the political order of Eastern Europe. "Kissinger, in his Diplomacy, published in 1994, approached the doctrine of roll back, inaugurated by Dulles, to the initiatives of Winston Churchill, a proponent of a realist negotiation with Stalin on the political organization of Eastern Europe to be developed" before or immediately after ?The end of the Second World War. According to Kissinger, the British premier's plan to enter into negotiations, the results of which would have been more favorable for the Atlantic powers than the settlement of central-eastern Europe after 1948, could have been feasible. If it was impracticable to prevent the re-establishment of the Soviet borders of 1941, a more dynamic and unscrupulous Anglo-American policy, which had been able to take advantage of the war situation, threatening to reduce the flow of aid to the USSR in the absence of a precise political counterpart, could have even obtained "The return of some form of independence for the Baltic States which in any case should have remained linked to Russia by mutual assistance treaties and by the presence of Soviet military bases in their territory".

"After the conclusion of the battle of Stalingrad (February 1943), the problem of Eastern Europe could be raised without risking a Soviet defeat and / or a separate peace between Hitler and Stalin (whose negotiations continued, in any case, until at least the mid 1944). Then "a diplomatic offensive could have been initiated to agree with Moscow on the political future of the nations beyond the borders of the USSR, by agreeing for them a statute similar to that of Finland". Also according to Kissinger, the question was still open in September 1947, when Andrei Aleksandrovi? ?danov, at the time one of Stalin's closest collaborators, distinguished two different categories of states within what Russia considered the "anti-fascist front" in Eastern Europe. In his speech announcing the formation of the Cominform (the world grouping of communist parties that succeeded the Comintern), ?danov unhesitatingly defined Yugoslavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Albania as the "new socialist democracies". On the contrary, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary were placed in a different typology still not better defined which suggested that the "fallback solution" hypothesized by Stalin for a part of the Eastern European countries was a "national-democratic but respectful of interests" status. Soviet "similar to that of Finland.

"Of the use of the" Finnish model "as a possible exit strategy of the Kremlin, to defuse the explosive effects of the change in the Ukrainian front, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in the" Financial Times ", immediately after Majdan Nezale?nosti's coup in Kiev, in an editorial steeped in great ambiguity because this model came out completely transformed by the new balance of power following the collapse of the USSR. In the new European order, Finland continues to remain foreign to NATO, but it is an integral part of the euro zone and, despite Moscow's attempts at economic infiltration, it is located within the hard core of the EU.

Consistently, therefore, Brzezinski came to argue that the solution to the current situation could consist in favoring the birth of a Ukraine projected towards the West, but “Militarily not hostile to Russia. In this way, Ukraine would have been "Finnishized", but by the EU and the US and not by Moscow. The explicit objective of this proposal was, therefore, to block the development of the Eurasian Economic Union, trusting that the example of the national choice of Kiev would be followed by the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and could restore their resistance against the alleged Russian attempts to progressively mutilate their sovereignty.

Viktor Yanukovych has proven himself to be a mendacious conspirator, a coward and a thief. Russian President Vladimir Putin would make a fatal mistake in backing it up again. Even without making this mistake, Russia can nevertheless plunge Ukraine into a destructive and dangerous civil war at the international level. Indeed, Moscow can demand and then forcefully support the secession of Crimea and some of the industrial regions of the south-east. Of course, Putin can also choose to ignore that such aggression would guarantee Russia the lasting hatred of the majority of Ukrainians, regardless of the outcome of a gut conflict fomented and supported by the Kremlin. In this case, however, his nostalgic dream of a Eurasian Union, dominated by Russia, would turn into a reality based on intimidation and coercion and this "It would set a disturbing precedent for all the states which, once incorporated into the USSR, have recently regained their independence. The example of Ukrainian national self-affirmation is already prompting Central Asian republics, especially Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, to strengthen their reaction against Moscow's attempts to deprive them of sovereignty. The economic elites of these states, increasingly politically active and increasingly pervaded by the national spirit, have no desire to see their homeland become a part of the new Russian Eurasian Empire conceived by Putin. The United States and the European Union, however, must play a constructive role in preventing the potential outbreak of regional violence in Ukraine that Russia intends to foster. Washington can and must make the most of "Clarity to Putin that he is willing to use all his influence to guarantee the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. Kiev, in turn, must pursue a policy similar to that successfully practiced by Finland: good neighborly relations and economic cooperation with Russia and the EU; no participation in a military alliance directed against Moscow, expansion of its economic and political projection towards Europe. In short, the adoption of the "Finnish model" represents, for Ukraine, the EU and Russia, the best solution to favor a satisfactory arrangement of the new east-west strategic balance "Brzezinski's proposed scheme is the same one contained in his 1997 volume, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, where it was argued that the" manifest destiny "of the USA was to become the dominant power of Eurasia11. If, in fact, Ukraine is for Moscow the heart of the plans for the restoration of the strategic space of the former Soviet Union, once Kiev was firmly anchored in the EU and NATO, the Russian Federation would have to definitively renounce its revanche imperial and choose the West. In other words, it should be linked to a Europe that for Brzezinski can only be a "transatlantic Europe" subordinated, in fact, if not by right, to the USA in its great economic, political and military choices.

The radical divergence between the strategic choices of the White House and those of the Kremlin is more than evident if one compares the "Brzezinski scheme" with the theses presented by the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergej Lavrov in an article in the newspaper "Kommersant" which appeared before the creation of the Ukrainian shatterbelt: of the genesis, that is, of an area of permanent instability between populations dominated by opposing and divergent political and cultural values. Then Lavrov, while speaking out for Moscow's refusal to enter the euro zone, proposed to harmonize "The integration processes of the European Union and the Eurasian Union. Insisting "On the irreplaceable role of Russia as the largest supplier of oil, gas and coal, Lavrov asked the European chancelleries" recognition of the Russian project of greater economic and political cohesion in the Eurasian space, conceived in harmony with a process of ever closer cooperation with the EU in view of a comprehensive Europe-Asia-Pacific link ”. These offers represented an outstretched hand in Brussels, but above all in Berlin, because Lavrov did not fail to point out that the "Russian-German agreement" had today the same importance for the future of the European Union as the creation of the European Union had in the past. "Franco-German tandem"

“Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Moscow and author of the successful book The End of Eurasia: Russia on the Border Between Geopolitics and Globalization, had already expressed his opinion on this point. An essay published in 2001, where, if it was hoped for the need for Moscow to abdicate the claims of Eurasian domination, it was argued, however, that it was impossible for Russia to renounce a "privileged agreement" with those countries that until 1991 had constituted the outposts of its southwestern border and to accept, therefore, the transformation of Belarus, Moldavia and Ukraine from "buffer states" to states embedded in the Atlantic Alliance13. In a speech on January 27, which appeared on the Valdai International Discussion Club website, Trenin argued that Europe had underestimated the strong negative impact caused on public opinion and the Russian ruling class by the projects for the creation of free trade zones for the 'Atlantic and the Pacific. Projects formulated in the statute of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), to which Canada, USA, Australia, Japan, China and some Asian and South American countries could virtually join, and in that of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) in progress negotiation between the European Union and the United States.

According to various studies the creation of these immense commercial spaces, intended to besiege Russia in the east and west, had produced a growing sense of encirclement in Moscow and forced Putin to redouble his efforts to complete the organization of the Eurasian economic community ". The Kremlin was, in fact, perfectly aware that the Russian Federation could not compete, if not in a clearly inferior position, for economic and demographic resources, with the EU and with the United States and their areas of influence. On the contrary, if the challenge had concerned the future Eurasian Union, conceived by Putin, the confrontation would have taken place on an equal footing and Moscow could have aspired to rebalance the dynamics of the current game14.

And it is here that the political future of Ukraine comes back powerfully: the nation that for natural resources, population, industrial apparatus, strategic position could make the difference and provide the future Eurasian bloc with the critical mass to have a specific weight comparable to that of western economies. In a nutshell, Putin is faced with this situation: Russia alone lacks an economic and demographic volume comparable to that of the EU; Russia, included in the Eurasian Union, could buy it; a Russia amputated from Ukraine and a Ukraine "United with the EU, as envisioned by Brzezinski, they would constitute an irreparable strategic defeat for Moscow. Precisely for this reason, on April 1, 2004, Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the magazine "Russia in Global Affairs", had hypothesized, intercepting the mood of Moscow political circles, the possibility of establishing an "informal and joint protectorate" of Russia and the European Union on Ukraine which could have constituted the last remedy, acceptable to all the contenders, perhaps capable of avoiding the precipitate of the crisis.