War offers two inverse dynamics: operational and political. On the operational plane, the situation is stationary. Despite the bloody fighting and bombing, as well as the loss of thousands of lives and the leveling of infrastructure and cities in Ukraine, this now translates into minimal Russian territorial gains. It’s kind of a slow-motion ‘operation’.
In the last week, the war development has materialized in specific combats, without appreciable movements, both in the Kharkov area, as well as in Izium, Zaporizhia and Kherson. The attempts of the Russian troops to progress northward from the Popasna area and definitively encircle the Severodonetsk-Lisichansk bastion did not bear fruit either. This continues to constitute the center of gravity of the struggle in the Donbass.
Until its fall, Russia will not be able to proclaim the “liberation of the Luhansk People’s Republic.” For this reason, kyiv, faithful to its tactic of delaying and wearing down the Russian troops –as in Mariúpol–, rejected the Russian ultimatum, issued last Wednesday, for the surrender of the Ukrainian combatants from the Azot factory in Severodonetsk.
On the political plane, the dynamics are frenetic. The Commission, on Friday, in a hurry, has recommended to the European Council that, at its meeting of 23-24, grant Ukraine the status of a candidate for entry into the EU. Ukraine is an essential item on the agendas of the G-7 meetings (26-27) and the NATO summit (29-30). But Ukraine does not even come close to meeting the political, economic and social criteria (among others) required to aspire to European membership. This is not politics, but political fiction.
The declarations of absolute support for Zelensky by the Macron-Draghi-Scholz trio (with the Romanian Iohannis as goop) in kyiv are nothing more than rhetoric that, surely, will not be supported indefinitely by the respective public opinion. If it were really intended to prop up to the end kyiv’s claim to recover all the territories occupied by Russia since 2014, we would be condemning ourselves to suffer an endless war on our continent. And that would end up devouring the European construction itself and, predictably, would lead us to the gates of World War III.
