I You have a friend, an American author, writes about war. Over the past decades, he went to South Sudan, Rwanda, Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza and other conflict areas. In the case of Ukraine, he said that there is one thing that emerged: Here it was clear who was the aggressor and who was the victim. Besides Bosnia, Ukraine’s resistance to Russia, in his opinion, is still one of two really fair wars.
Three years after a fair war against Putin’s aggression, we are now facing, with Donald Trump, an unfair peace. Ukraine will lose lands and will not get compensation for its losses. War crimes will become without punishment and the Ukrainians will not be provided with the security guarantees necessary to protect them from the future Russian attack.
It is not a new scenario. Think of the Russian war and the 2008 Russia. Russia attacked the neighboring Georgia, however, then French President Nicholas Sarkozy, whose country held the presidency of the European Council, did his best to recover. Russia, Forcing Georgia on a humiliating peace.
Russia’s war on Georgia had another less famous result. After Russia’s victory, Vladimir Putin adopted plans for a widespread war against Ukraine. The weak Western response to Russia’s aggression in Georgia gave a reason to believe that it would interact in the case of Ukraine. Just as his war against Georgia was largely a reaction to Revolution supporting the West In 2003, Ukraine had to “punish” the Orange Revolution in 2004, which threatened to remove Ukraine from the orbit of Russia. Putin’s plan leaked and its details appeared in a 2009 newspaper article Written by two Ukrainian security experts. But at that time it was so fantasy that a few people
However, Ukraine was rescued, no matter how much Putin’s fate was in his mind in 2010, when the pro -Russian Yanukovich Victor Yanukovich reached power. In 2013, Yanukovych supported Ukraine’s journey towards European integration. But in the sudden face of Volt, when it comes to signing a historical association agreement with the European Union that year, the plug of plug. This sudden change in the heart came after a meeting with Putin. There was speculation that Putin was coercive Yanukovic by threatening to launch his war on Ukraine if the country continued its western movement. Yanukovych unilaterally led to the signing of the European Union’s agreement to a new wave of protests that started in KYIV in November 2013 – and eventually became known as the name Euromaidan Revolution.
The confrontation lasted for several months, and by early 2014, it became clear that the Russian invasion was only a matter of time. I tell this from my own experience: during the Euromaidan, I worked at the dedicated Thinktank company, and we were informed of Putin’s plans. We knew that we only had until the end of the Sochi Winter Olympics. Immediately after its end, the Crimea began to include. According to the Kremlin, this was supposed to start a “Russian Spring”-an uprising of the Russian-speaking Ukraine population against Kiev. It failed to achieve it. The majority of Ukrainians, regardless of the language that they spoke, do not want to allow war in their homes.
Instead of a civil war in Ukraine, Putin got a low -density war in Donbas that he could not win. However, he knew how to wait. Those who know Putin are well say that the philosophy he lives is similar to the judo – a sport he has practiced since his youth. In the judo, stay close to your opponent and wear it until you give up. Despite the failure to achieve his goals in 2014, Putin did not give up anything. The full invasion of 2022 confirms this.
More than once, Putin and Doctors insisted that Russia is not in war with Ukraine, but with the West in Ukraine. Ukraine sees an artificial nation, created by the West to sabotage the power of Russia. Independent Ukraine is guilty of the truth of its existence. The armistice is possible in such a war but not peace – just as there can be no peace in the war between Rome and Cating.
However, the truce will solve very little if any. For Ukraine, it will bring an additional danger. Since the beginning of the war, the Ukrainians have been calling for a fair and lasting peace. Now, instead, they will get a fragile and unfair truce.
The contradiction between high expectations and humiliating reality is one of the most reliable indicators of the pre -revolution crisis. Unlike the years 2004 and 2014, a new revolution can lead people who have returned from the front and feel betrayed by their government. The resulting civil conflict would give Putin an ideal opportunity to invade Ukraine again – this time on the pretext of establishing political stability.
In February 2022, Putin’s goal was to pick up Kyiv In three days. What he failed to do after that, Trump may help him to achieve it during the next three years or even sooner. After that, the whole world is in front of him. Experts say it will be ready to attack the West inside Three to five years next.
Many people in the West ignore his long -term ambitions now, just as they ignored them in 2008. But if history has anything that teaches us, one of his lessons is: You cannot appease the aggressor who thinks in the long term. Ukrainians learn this in the difficult way. Before the comprehensive invasion of 2022, we were warned of the war but we did not want to believe it. The human nature is likely to be mobilized only as soon as the threat becomes real.
I love to be wrong, but my historian intestine tells me that in February 2022, the world entered a contract of war. The saying “If you want peace, preparing for war” is still relevant after three years of war in Ukraine as it was 2000 years ago.