Russia’s “act of aggression” against Ukraine, as described by the United Nations General Assembly in its “extraordinary emergency period” of March 1, 2022, following the definition adopted by itself at the proposal of the former Soviet Union (A/RES/3314-XXIX of December 14, 1974), for constituting “the first use of armed force by a State in contravention of the Charter” of San Francisco and paragraph 4 of its article 2, has caused a true historical rupture. It is monumental.
It is, on the one hand, the closing point of a previous war in progress, extended and not attended to –13,000 dead and 30,000 wounded in 2015 when the so-called Normandy Quartet met– and that the international community proved incapable of conjuring up. It is, in addition and on the other hand, the culmination of a long process of comprehensive transformation of the international legal and political order that has been going on since 1989, 3 decades ago. China and Russia have put their cards on the table since February 4.
Whether we like it or not, a “new era” is now opening in international relations, as the aforementioned powers maintain from their perspectives in their Joint Declaration of Beijing.
Beyond addressing the incidents of the ongoing conflagration, the heads of state and government who signed the Versailles Declaration of March 10 and 11, 2022 and the NATO Declaration of March 24 are no strangers to this “epochal” break. »: “Our shared values of freedom and democracy” are defended in Ukraine, says the first, while the second accepts that “Russia’s unprovoked war…represents a fundamental challenge to the values and norms that have brought security and prosperity everyone on the European continent.
The war against Ukraine is the trigger for a substantive question, both geopolitical and identity-bearing in mind that we are in the century of citizen and territorial deconstructions, behind which cultural proximities remain-which emerges with more costs irreparable suffered, in their own flesh, by those who will not forget it, the Ukrainians, for its definitive resolution. Today the ancient Ottoman Empire, the Sublime Gate, mediates in it, and the Chinese spur it on, pretending to be oblivious to the facts.
Immersed in trivialities and conflicts deliberately stimulated by globalist progressivism and the disciples of Gramsci and Adorno, we Americans and Western Europeans squander the long transition that was inaugurated by the fall of the Iron Curtain (1989) and closed by covid-19. We witness, culturally weakened, a baptism of blood of the Global Order within medieval Kievan Rus, mother of the Russians.
Meanwhile, we celebrate the decline of our Judeo-Christian and Greco-Latin roots, making relativism prevail, trivializing our political conceptions and about democracy, to the point of inventing the category of the illiberal.
Ukraine, until yesterday, interested us as the backyard, a bridge to the East, over which the bitterness in favor of the United States, such as that of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, retraces. One, for having interests with the deposed Ukrainian president Yanukovych, an associate of Putin. Another, for pressuring his successor Zelensky to offer him evidence of the above. Nuclear power – fifteen reactors – is the other bone of contention.
On this side, during the transition, the destruction of statues, the burning of churches, forging retail identities and ashaming us of our memory have mattered more.
The European Parliament had already condemned in 2014 – not now in the heat of war – “Russia’s violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine and calls on Russia to put an immediate end to all kinds of violence”. The UN Assembly, which this time condemns the Russian “act of aggression”, given a similar hypothesis and with sibylline language, without results, urges in 2020 “the Russian Federation, as the occupying power, to withdraw its Crimean military forces… and end without delay their temporary occupation of the territory of Ukraine.”
In view of the above, the condemnation by the UN of “the declaration made by the Russian Federation on February 24, 2022 of a ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine” and demanding that “the Russian Federation put an immediate end to the use of force”, voted affirmatively by 141 States parties over 5 votes against –Russia, Belarus, Syria, North Korea and Eritrea– mediating 35 abstentions, in no way means that the world order of 1945 is resurrecting, now yes, on bases solid. Let’s not fool ourselves.
The same Declaration of Versailles, adopted by the Heads of State and Government of the European Union, is not unrelated to what has been stated: “The Russian war of aggression constitutes a colossal turning point in European history”, they agree. They accept that the present challenge is to live up to “this new reality, protecting our citizens, our values, our democracies and the European model”. Except for the United States, North, Central and South Americans, as a whole and as part of the West, we remain behind, without our own narrative, and this can also be observed because the effects of the war and the New Order, which we see as something distant, we will carry them on our backs for two more generations, until 2049.
Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, in the days prior to the aggression against Ukraine by the former, from Beijing have told the world about their rules, which will be present in the peace negotiation, while the former strengthens, winning, its status quo of 2014. They look at us with contempt, in short, because we have been incapable of defending our thousand-year-old history, so they tell us, without hesitation, that they have, as world powers, “a rich cultural and historical heritage” and “democratic traditions… that are based on thousands of years of experience.”
