The brutal invasion of Ukraine ordered by the Russian Putin regime has a clear objective, to put an end to Ukrainian democracy in order to prevent the Russian people from assuming the demands for freedom and democracy that the Ukrainians embraced with exemplary conviction that is shaking the conscience of the western nations. It is democracy, not NATO, that Putin fears; The international community of democratic nations must act firmly in the face of this attack on world peace, supporting Ukraine and cutting off economic ties with the aggressor authoritarianism.
The Russian propaganda machine seeks to convince its people and international public opinion, which feels threatened by NATO, that this defensive alliance is integrating Ukraine to undermine the foundations of its insecurity, and other lies propagated by its state media and the digital channels with which it spreads disinformation to destabilize democracies in the world.
In a recent article entitled Calamity Again, its author, Anne Applebaum, refutes this propaganda discourse and describes the true causes of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, emphasizing that it is a response to an ideological threat and not a military threat. She points out that the Ukrainian determination to become a full democracy is a challenge to Putin’s project of building an autocratic kleptocracy in which he has unlimited power as it was in the days of the Soviet Union. She stresses that if the Ukrainians succeed in becoming a democratic nation with the rule of law and integrated into Europe, it will be inevitable that the Russian people will also wonder why they, too, could not be a truly free society.
The truth is that several years ago, Putin began a process by which he developed a new form of authoritarianism camouflaged in a democratic farce in which, once he comes to power, democratic institutions are destroyed from within, ending their independence through control supporter; In addition to permanently attacking all possible competitors, so that they do not have the effective capacity to challenge them electorally and thus ensure their permanence in government when popularity declines. I have always thought that the model of the regime of Hugo Chávez and those who followed him was never Fidel Castro but rather Putin.
In another article on the same subject, published by The New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, this writer points out that during his career he has refused to use the cliché that nothing will ever be the same after a certain fact. Despite this, he maintains that the historical dimension of the invasion of Ukraine is such that our world will never be the same again. Friedman emphasizes that what Putin intends is to appropriate the neighbor’s territory as it was done in the eighteenth century, but in the globalized world of the twenty-first century.
The pandemic taught the world that the international economy cannot depend on a single supplier, that it is necessary to diversify supply sources and locations for production plants. That it is of fundamental importance to reorient world trade flows by bringing production closer to the large consumption centers, which also opens up enormous opportunities for regions such as Latin America, which could have a new opportunity for growth and sustainable development.
The invasion of Ukraine makes this trend an imperative. The idea that doing business with totalitarian regimes would make their countries progress and then convert to democracy has not worked. They are using the resources of Western democracies to attack them. Democratic nations must demand democracy in order to share prosperity.
The Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller wrote his famous poem against indifference in which he reflected on how no one said anything when the Nazis took to the concentration camps those they considered their enemies because the others thought they did not belong to the group that was being chasing, “Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me”. They have already invaded the Ukraine, they threaten Finland and Sweden, the democratic nations must wake up and realize that in reality the threat is against them.
Oscar Ortiz Antelo
* He has been a senator and minister of state
The brutal invasion of Ukraine ordered by the Russian Putin regime has a clear objective, to put an end to Ukrainian democracy in order to prevent the Russian people from assuming the demands for freedom and democracy that the Ukrainians embraced with exemplary conviction that is shaking the conscience of the western nations. It is democracy, not NATO, that Putin fears; The international community of democratic nations must act firmly in the face of this attack on world peace, supporting Ukraine and cutting off economic ties with the aggressor authoritarianism.
The Russian propaganda machine seeks to convince its people and international public opinion, which feels threatened by NATO, that this defensive alliance is integrating Ukraine to undermine the foundations of its insecurity, and other lies propagated by its state media and the digital channels with which it spreads disinformation to destabilize democracies in the world.
In a recent article entitled Calamity Again, its author, Anne Applebaum, refutes this propaganda discourse and describes the true causes of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, emphasizing that it is a response to an ideological threat and not a military threat. She points out that the Ukrainian determination to become a full democracy is a challenge to Putin’s project of building an autocratic kleptocracy in which he has unlimited power as it was in the days of the Soviet Union. She stresses that if the Ukrainians succeed in becoming a democratic nation with the rule of law and integrated into Europe, it will be inevitable that the Russian people will also wonder why they, too, could not be a truly free society.
The truth is that several years ago, Putin began a process by which he developed a new form of authoritarianism camouflaged in a democratic farce in which, once he comes to power, democratic institutions are destroyed from within, ending their independence through control supporter; In addition to permanently attacking all possible competitors, so that they do not have the effective capacity to challenge them electorally and thus ensure their permanence in government when popularity declines. I have always thought that the model of the regime of Hugo Chávez and those who followed him was never Fidel Castro but rather Putin.
In another article on the same subject, published by The New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, this writer points out that during his career he has refused to use the cliché that nothing will ever be the same after a certain fact. Despite this, he maintains that the historical dimension of the invasion of Ukraine is such that our world will never be the same again. Friedman emphasizes that what Putin intends is to appropriate the neighbor’s territory as it was done in the eighteenth century, but in the globalized world of the twenty-first century.
The pandemic taught the world that the international economy cannot depend on a single supplier, that it is necessary to diversify supply sources and locations for production plants. That it is of fundamental importance to reorient world trade flows by bringing production closer to the large consumption centers, which also opens up enormous opportunities for regions such as Latin America, which could have a new opportunity for growth and sustainable development.
The invasion of Ukraine makes this trend an imperative. The idea that doing business with totalitarian regimes would make their countries progress and then convert to democracy has not worked. They are using the resources of Western democracies to attack them. Democratic nations must demand democracy in order to share prosperity.
The Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller wrote his famous poem against indifference in which he reflected on how no one said anything when the Nazis took to the concentration camps those they considered their enemies because the others thought they did not belong to the group that was being chasing, “Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me”. They have already invaded the Ukraine, they threaten Finland and Sweden, the democratic nations must wake up and realize that in reality the threat is against them.
Oscar Ortiz Antelo
* He has been a senator and minister of state
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