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Our absurd campaign in Russia

by

Donatella di Cesare

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Should we help the aggrieved Ukrainian people or should we go to war with Putin? This great ambiguity has crept into many speeches from the outset, tacitly endorsed or more openly flaunted. And it is now such an ambiguity that it hardly allows us to distinguish between the two objectives, which are quite different. Because it is one thing to save the lives of the Ukrainians, which is only possible by immediately stopping the conflict with intermediaries, negotiations and agreed solutions, and quite another to adopt war measures against Putin’s Russia, i.e. to risk an unprecedented catastrophe. Those who aim at the first goal, in addition to saving the lives of Ukrainians, have the good of the European peoples at heart. Those, on the other hand, who more or less subtly imply the second objective want to open up the scenarios for a new, devastating and unknown catastrophe. Have we really reached the point of seriously considering those who say that ’better than a world with Putin on the borders of the EU is a nuclear war’? Those who today speak in favour of the latter hypothesis should also assume their responsibilities for the future. 
Suddenly, the Italian public space has become populated with hawks. While the coronavirus is still here, we have been thrown into a conflict whose causes few actually know and whose way out is not indicated. After enduring sovereignist propaganda against ’illegal immigrants’, foreigners and immigrants for so long, and after the vicissitudes of the pandemic, between the initial ’Chinese virus’ and the ’no vax’ drifts, we are now being dragged into a grotesque and poisonous campaign in Russia with militaristic slogans and watchwords that instil fear and foment hatred. More than ever the ’enemy’ remains - only this time it is the ’Russian’, starting with the one next door. Thus, for example, an Italian teenager whose mother is Russian was beaten up at school in the province of Brescia. A further good target are the cynical and unsuspecting so-called ’pacifists’, as well as all those who do not share this ideological campaign - and that is perhaps the majority in the country.  
This campaign of Russia, sponsored behind the screens, revolves around a few cornerstones. The first is that everything depends on Putin, on what is in his brain, on his delusions, on his madness. There are even high-calibre psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who have launched into tragicomic remote diagnoses. If he, who is the cause of all our ills, were eliminated, everything would be as it was before. Which is a good way to depoliticise the issue completely and avoid considering it in its complexity. The second cornerstone is the equally ridiculous battle against the oligarchs, perpetrated by seizing a yacht and a villa - crumbs of course! - and carried out for internal purposes, to prepare public opinion for what is to come, namely the terrible effects of sanctions here. But do the oligarchs really count in Putin’s political system of power? And are these measures the right way forward? It is doubtful. The third cornerstone lies in the old proverbial phrase "let’s arm ourselves and go", the one that unfortunately condenses a lot of bombastic and farcical Italianism that has already led to devastating effects. And speaking of history, and of rash comparisons that have no basis in fact, it is appropriate to say, with a firm voice, that we do not want to repeat the mistakes of the past. It makes a certain impression to listen to the lucid and calm warnings of the army generals, who evidently know what they are talking about, in the face of the noisy and disruptive speeches of politicians, such as the foreign minister, who should have more responsibility.   
In order to defend the Ukrainians who have been attacked, this war must be stopped immediately, where it is being fought, through negotiations conducted by European authorities acting as intermediaries to the belligerent ones. On the other hand, the Ukrainians are not defended by spreading the conflict, changing its scope and objective. This is what those fomenting the campaign for a new ’just war’ are trying to do, smuggling it in as a crusade for democracy and freedom against autocracy. We have had enough of ’just wars’, this oxymoron whose devastating results we already know. It seems neither prudent nor wise to go and ’free the Russian people from the tyrant’. Putin’s Russia is unfortunately not just the dissidents demonstrating in St Petersburg; it is a huge and diverse country with its own difficult - and very European - history. When the Russian people have independently reached the tipping point, they will free themselves from Putin. In the meantime, what we should have done, what we should do, would be to multiply contacts, opportunities for exchange in all areas. Shutting them up behind a new curtain, pushing them back behind the stigma of ’enemy’ does not help them and it does not help us.  

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