Putin and Ivan’s dilemma, the terrible

1. The supposed Russian danger serves Macron to divert attention from the troubled internal political situation. Neither history nor anything in the present justify the fear of a Russian threat.

On the contrary, the Russians, the trauma of the Russian imagination (which sustains and is fed by successive dictatorships), have historical and current ‘reasons’ to fear, Sine Die an invasion coming from the West.

In the last five centuries Russia has been invaded several times, always from the West. «The Russians fought once every 33 years always on the Great Plain of Northern Europe. The invasions were always out there, open area, without natural borders to the tip of the slice that is Poland.

Perhaps it is due to the absence of a natural protection of mountains or rivers that Russia remains authoritarian in its nature and is not free from the obsession of a threat of invasion.

2. The Warsaw Pact was dissolved, but the born remained and widened. Since then the Russians have seen their constant approach, with the adhesion of countries that Russia claims to have made their commitment to never join them: Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1990; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia in 2004; Albania in 2009 **.

In 2004, after the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991, all former states of the Warsaw Pact were in the NATO or the European Union. Today there are American Armed Forces a few hundred miles of Moscow, Poland and the Baltic States.

3. Trump knows very well, in fact, Putin’s reason to invade Ukraine. The United States of the ‘Bidens’-which are not Trump’s-and the venal remaining of the Union leaders gave him all the reasons, or pretext, for the unacceptable invasion. Ukraine’s entrance to the NATO was the complete siege, the red line that could not accept. The fear that dominates the Russian imagination made the rest.

4. Ukraine is full of Russians. When many years ago I spent tourism by Sebastopol I felt that I was in a Russian city. In addition, the recovery of Crimea *** gave Russia a port of hot waters with direct access to the missing oceans.

The regions of Carcovia, Lugansky, Donetsk, Krtdson, Mykolaiv and Odessa will not return to Ukraine. As Putin said: “Russia has lost these territories for several reasons, but people stayed there. Several million ethnic Russians who still remain within what the USSR was, but outside Russia. From the great principality of Moscow, passing through Peter, the Great, Stalin and Now Putin, each Russian leader, no matter what ideology, he confronted himself with the same problem: the ports continue to freeze and the northern European plain remains flat. The map with which Ivan confronted himself, the terrible is the same as Putin confronts himself.

*Tim Marshall’s breath, geography prisoners (“unrest), whose reading I highly recommend.

** To these, they add Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, who would like to join the two organizations but are kept at a distance due to their geographical proximity to Russia and because the three have Russian troops or pro-Russian militias in their territory. The entry of any of these three countries in the NATO could spoil a war.

*** Crimea was part of Russia for two centuries before being transferred to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine in 1954 by President Khrushchev.