by Enrico Oliari –
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu spoke on the phone with his French counterpart Sebastien Lecornu, and Moscow signaled “availability for dialogue on Ukraine”, perhaps starting from the Istanbul plan. However, the Russian ministry specified in the note, “if France sends soldiers to the Ukrainian conflict, as declared by the Elysée, there will be problems for France itself.
The phone call between the two ministers comes the day after the start of the NATO Foreign Ministerial, where Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg reiterated his commitment to bringing Ukraine into the Atlantic Alliance once the conflict is over.
Ukraine’s membership of NATO was established in 2008 in Bucharest together with that of Georgia and, as Russian President Vladimir Putin recently confirmed, it is one of the main causes of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine: on the occasion of the fall of At the Berlin Wall, the then Soviet Bloc was guaranteed that NATO would not expand beyond the Elbe, but since then there has been a continuous expansion of the military alliance which, with Ukraine, would involve the deployment of forces and bases practically on the enemy’s doorstep.
Stoltenberg went even further by saying that he believes that “it is very important to keep the one-step process for Ukraine to become a member by eliminating the requirements of the Membership Action Plan and thus ensuring that when an invitation is issued, is equivalent to becoming a member of NATO.” Among the various justifications for the urgency of assimilating Ukraine, the NATO secretary places the failure to comply with the Minsk agreements, blaming Moscow for this. In reality the agreements were not respected by both parties, and in particular the Minsk-II, which envisaged the drafting of a new Ukrainian Constitution by 2015 which would provide for autonomies in the Russian-speaking territories (as happens for example in Alto Adige) is Was made waste paper right from Kiev. Instead of regional autonomy, the declared neo-Nazi Azov battalion arrived in Donbass, committing war crimes (OSCE sources, 2015), and the central government closed the Russian-language press, a number of Russian-language schools and banned the Russian in public documents.
NATO foreign ministers have accepted Kiev’s pressing requests for missiles, armaments and financing, although the Russian advance has not stopped. The Italian minister Antonio Tajani reported that “a Russian offensive is expected at the end of winter”, but reiterated Italy’s opposition to the use of NATO soldiers in Ukraine, an eventuality that would trigger an escalation from the results not predictable.
At the summit, 100 billion dollars were put on the table for the Ukrainian crisis, money that the various countries will lack to finance, for example, healthcare and education, and in a European Union that in 2022 has renounced its role as peacemaker and mediator, the Pesc Josep Borrell promised Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba a greater economic commitment and military supplies starting from the 5 billion taken, ironically, from the “Peace Fund”.
