The greats Elio Gaspari and Janio de Freitas discussed in their columns in sheet military tensions in Ukraine. While the first places the origins of the conflict in NATO’s territorial ambitions, the second blames the Biden government for the crisis.
Both could have mentioned that Putin has stationed more than 150,000 troops on the border and has never left the logic of ultimatums and threats. The desire to describe Russia as a country that is only reacting to aggression leaves the impression that the columnists start from the premise that there is only one empire in this fight.
The analyzes on the origins of the conflict are more consensual than the information war suggests. Nobody questions that NATO extrapolated its territorial and geopolitical limits, taking advantage of a moment of weakness in Russia in the midst of the post-Soviet transition. Putin, who came to power by exploiting civilizational humiliation, is a child of the economic destruction wrought by the Washington consensus in the 1990s.
It is also difficult to question Ukraine’s desire to seek another historic destination further away from Moscow. Although the country is closely associated with the Soviet Union, Ukrainian nationalism was already so important in the 1920s that the Bolsheviks were forced to accommodate the Ukrainian state within a federal system.
In 1994, Kiev signed the Budapest Memorandum and relinquished its nuclear weapons in exchange for an unfulfilled promise to respect the integrity of its borders. In the decades that followed, it was one of the countries that grew the least in the world, along with the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this context, the growing willingness of its population to adhere to the European project, which pacified a continent ravaged by wars, cannot be ignored.
The current conflict can be boiled down to the impossible contradiction between Russia’s anti-imperialist arguments against NATO and its imperial ambitions towards Ukraine.
Moscow has the right to demand that Kiev not join NATO in the name of securing its borders. It cannot, however, invoke the Soviet past to prevent Ukrainians from deepening their relations with the European Union. This argument is as perverse as that of the European powers that resort to colonial history to explain their pre-eminence in African countries.
Those who defend, in all fairness, the right of Latin American countries to emancipate themselves from US influence must also, in the name of coherence, apply the logic of self-determination to Ukraine.
If the deepening of the union between Russia and China against NATO, formalized earlier this month, points the way to a multipolar world, Putin’s essay published last year listing the reasons for Russia’s onslaught in Ukraine is a fallacy. history constructed to justify the invasion of a sovereign country.
The true anti-imperialist does not choose which imperialism he wants to oppose; he is against any and all imperialism.
