It happened last Wednesday in Congress. The presidents of the Foreign Affairs Commissions of the Parliaments of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania visited the Lower House to debate with the Spanish deputies on the international situation. The main course was, logically, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the first secretary of the Congress Table, Gerardo Pisarello (United We Can), launched a speech that began by condemning the “illegal, intolerable invasion ordered by Putin” to later focus on attacking the Western response, questioning the sanctions and the enlargement of NATO. “Uncontrolled warmongering is walking towards an abyss and towards a dangerous degradation of democracy in Europe,” he charged.
This allegation blew up the Latvian high official, Rihards Kols, who knows first-hand what is happening in Ukraine.
How can we say uncontrolled, uncontrolled aggression? he asked himself rhetorically. “It is an aggression without previous provocation, it is not that it is a war without control. Looking back, this is precisely what Putin wants, it seems to me; he wants to create many frozen conflicts, it is his recipe and a perfect strategy to divide countries », he scolded the podemita with diplomacy, but visibly irritated.
For this national-conservative politician from the All for Latvia National Alliance party, Putin has come so far thanks to his strategy of dividing societies and making his attacks “frozen, stalled” for Western public opinion. “Before February 24, in fact, the war in eastern Ukraine was already a forgotten war, no one remembered it, especially in Europe,” he recalled, “but there were Ukrainians dying every day.” For this reason, he did not miss a speech that, in his opinion, benefits the interests of the Russian dictator. “We cannot speak of an uncontrolled war,” he continued. “I cannot accept that it is called an uncontrolled war. No, it is a war provoked by Russia and it controls it,” he insisted to Pisarello.
The bulk of the key points related to Putin’s attack on Ukraine revealed discrepancies between Podemos and the vision of the three Baltic countries. All of them have been facing threats from Moscow for years and warning Europe of the danger embodied by the Russian dictator, but the Podemite leader had no problem trying to teach them about NATO. Pisarello considered it “arguable” that the accession of Finland and Sweden “serves to make Europe or the planet safer or so that one can live in peace.” “An uncontrolled expansion of NATO could fuel the war and, what is worse, lead to a direct clash between the US and Russia, in the heart of Europe. Would this benefit the population of Ukraine? We have doubts », he pointed out. His statement collided with the representatives of the three Baltic countries. Kols warned those who want to “stop” the process that it will only bring benefits because NATO will be “stronger”. The president of the Estonian Foreign Affairs Commission, Marlo Minkelson, insisted that the entry of both countries into the Alliance must be carried out “promptly and easily”, and his counterpart in Lithuania, Andrikiene Liucija Laima, stressed that it will benefit security “of the entire region”.
Pisarello also questioned the sanctions. “There are sanctions that work, but it is also true that some that are being applied harm the civilian population more than the oligarchs,” he stressed, to the stupefaction of the Baltic representatives.
