Putin’s defiance and humiliation

By surprise. Accompanied by alarm sirens. On momentous, highly symbolic days, the first anniversary of the Russian invasion and the ninth anniversary of the massacre of the Euromaidan martyrs, the hundred or so demonstrators riddled with bullets by the provocateurs and the special policemen of Victor Yanukovych, the then expelled Putinist president, just as they began surreptitiously the Russian invasion of Donbas and the annexation of Crimea. With the highly significant images broadcast by television all over the world of the walk of both presidents through the monumental center of the capital, the impressive golden bulbs of the Cathedral of San Miguel, and the Maidan wall where the Heavenly Hundred is worshiped , those who fell in 2014, named after the type of Cossack warrior unit and become the reason for the highest decoration for civil courage awarded by the Government to those who fight for freedom, democracy and human rights.

It has been an unusual visit, historic like few others. There is no message of greater political forcefulness or significance, even military. Putin wants to obliterate the Ukrainian nation with war and the president of the United States, the commander-in-chief of the most powerful army in the world, goes to his capital to personally assure his president, Volodimir Zelensky, that he will not allow the Russian dictator to do your own thing or deal, with the setback that would mean the defeat of Ukraine, a defeat to democracy and the civilized world order, governed by the rules.

Biden’s trip to kyiv by train from Poland was not obvious, without the possibility of using the cumbersome and armored air means of the US army. It was fraught with risk and constituted a challenge by an 80-year-old president to a dictator ten years younger who lives in seclusion and isolation in the Kremlin and has only very occasionally ventured extremely cautiously and briefly into the territory. Ukrainian occupied by his army.

Biden’s identification with the positions of the Zelensky government, expressed with extreme clarity in Munich in the debate between the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, and the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dmitro Kuleba, constitutes the framework in which the Peace proposals coming from Beijing, hardly acceptable if they are limited to a fragile ceasefire that serves to resupply Russian troops or if they do not contemplate the restoration of the territorial integrity and national sovereignty of Ukraine guaranteed by all treaties and pacts international agreements, including the United Nations Charter, to which Russia is bound. They are summed up in a few words from Biden with epic and compromising resonances: “One year later, kyiv resists, Ukraine resists, democracy resists.”