Over the past few weeks, Russia has increased its offensive once morest Ukraine, shelling infrastructure, power plants and residential areas. The Russian Army, from its protected positions in its country, systematically harasses the places that it forced to abandon due to the courage and superiority of the Ukrainian Army. Not content with mercilessly bombing civilians, Putin and other senior Russian officials have suggested they might use tactical nuclear weapons to defend annexed areas of Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says there is an “enormous risk” that a conventional weapons conflict between atomic powers might escalate into nuclear war. What the Kremlin is telling the world is that the Ukrainians, apart from deserving an exemplary punishment for having dared to defend their homeland and not letting enemy forces take over their territory, are leading the world into nuclear war. History has seldom known such cynicism!
last sunday in The country, from Spain, in “The Punishment of Ukraine”, the Nobel Prize for Literature Mario Vargas Llosa wrote: “Vladímir Putin does not understand this, convinced as he is that Ukraine is part of traditional Russia and, since Russia has committed the insolence of not allowing itself to be occupied by an enemy army, now it retaliates and ensures that the inhabitants of Kiev and the Ukraine will spend a terrible winter, in which the old and the children, that is to say, the victims who cannot defend themselves, will bear the worst part… We must go once morest the assumptions that Vladimir Putin encourages: not forget Ukraine, where a fight for the freedom of the entire West is currently taking place. Or are there naive people who think that Putin’s aggression once morest Ukraine will end there, without the Russian Army intervening elsewhere?
Russia is far from being the military power that Putin vaunts so much. Much of the ammunition he has to bring from North Korea, and almost all of the suicide drones he uses once morest Ukraine he buys from Iran. Putin, who has suffered the humiliation of having to turn to the Belarusian Army to bail him out, has his troops so demoralized that every day he has more need to turn to mercenaries to fight a war that he has not been able to win. Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch close to Putin, is the promoter of the Wagner group, which operates in Ukraine, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. Wagner, which is made up of murderous mercenaries pulled from prisons in Russia, Syria and Africa (according to German intelligence, Prigozhin toured several Russian prisons to recruit 1,000 convicts to fight for Moscow), specializes, apart from doing jobs for him dirty to the Kremlin, in murdering civilians, carrying out mass executions and indiscriminate looting.
apostille: Russia, which claims to be the second world economic power, is only the eleventh, with a GDP slightly higher than Brazil’s. Nor is the Russian eagerness to monopolize more land every day understood. In terms of GDP/km² of area, Russia is one of the poorest countries in the world. In fact, Colombia’s GDP/km² is three times that of Russia.
