Biden and Putin are marked red lines in Ukraine

The world stepped back on Tuesday 41 years, 11 months and 29 days. The best sample, the headlines of the US press. The 'New York Times' titled: "Biden wa

Biden and Putin are marked red lines in Ukraine

The world stepped back on Tuesday 41 years, 11 months and 29 days. The best sample, the headlines of the US press. The 'New York Times' titled: "Biden warns Putin of economic consequences if the aggression continues." The 'Washington Post' entitled December 9, 1980: "The warnings in relation to Poland are trying to avoid a surprise on the part of the Soviet Union. The journalistic style has changed. Also the support. The holder of 2021 is the website From the newspaper; the 1980, of the printed edition, the only one that was at that time.

But the backdrop is the same: the threat of invasion of the Soviet Union - or of its heiress, Russia - of a European country to return it to its area of influence. In 1980, he was Poland. EN 2021, it is Ukraine. And the United States and NATO are willing to adopt very harsh measures against Moscow if that is carried out. History, which Francis Fukuyama had said that had run out of the fall of the Berlin Wall, resurrected.

If in 1980, the message was issued by senior government charges of the Hope President, Jimmy Carter, today was communicated by the Head of State and the US government, Joe Biden, to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. Both maintained an online 'online summit of two hours in which a large part of the conversation was concentrated in Ukraine, a country to which Moscow threatens nearly 100,000 solo located on the common border, which seven years ago annexed the Crimean Peninsula and that since then it is suffering from a fed war, financed, and sustained by Russia.

Biden, started the conference in the most cordial way - "It's a pity that we could not see each other at the G-20 summit" - but it was very direct. According to a brief statement from the White House, the American expressed the Russian "the deep concern of the United States and the European Allies about the escalation of forces [Russians] around Ukraine and made it clear that the United States and its allies will respond with strong Economic and other measures in the eventuality of a military escalation ". The measures that Baraja Washington would leave Russia in a situation relatively similar to that of Iran, as they would include the expulsion of Moscow from the SWIFT International Bank Payment System, actions against the 'oligarchs' that control that country-and that they are Very close to Putin- and the suspension of the purchase by Germany of the Russian natural gas that will travel through the recently built Nordstream-2 gas pipeline.

After the conversation, Biden, in the purest style of the Cold War, spoke with the most important European allies in the US: Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy. Such a deployment of transatlantic solidarity reflects one of the most surprising consequences of international politics in 2021: nobody has done so much for the revitalization of NATO and Vladimir Putin with its attack on Ukraine since 2014.

The Russian government took on giving his version of the conversation. The press service of the Kremlin declared that "In general, the conversation has had a frank and pragmatic character", which is often, in diplomatic language, a way of saying that the interlocutors did not agree on anything. The position of Putin focused on requesting guarantees to the US that neither that country nor its allies will deploy attack systems in countries near Russia. That is a constant in the strategy of Putin and a large part of the Soviet leader elite, which considers a betrayal the expansion of NATO, which has led that military organization at the gates of Russia, especially when on February 9, 1990 , the then US Secretary of State, Jame Baker, promised the President of the USSR; Mijaíl Gorbachev that NATO would not advance "even an inch towards the east".

Ukraine wants to enter NATO, which would be, possibly, 'Casus Belli' for Russia. And NATO is not going to play a war for that country. But there is an intermediate terrain that concerns Moscow: the progressive armament and the integration of the Ukrainian armed forces within the structure of defense of Western democracies. That is combined with the Russian obsession that the US is surrounding you. From there it comes its requirement of guarantees that there will be no US offensive weapons or other countries of the Atlantic Alliance in Ukraine. A few weeks ago, the Russian leader was more explicit when he referred to that situation as "the problem. A problem that is based on" the possible deployment in the Ukrainian territory of attack systems with a flight time of seven to ten minutes to Moscow, or five minutes in the case of hypersonic systems. Imagine that. "

Date Of Update: 07 December 2021, 16:24