In a few days it will be three years since Russia invaded Ukraine. Back then we could not look away. Suddenly everything was filled with a multitude of commentators, pretending to be experts on the conflict or on one or all of its protagonists, raising a deafening chatter that mixed with the voices of the real experts, who fortunately were also there. There was talk of the martyred city of Mariupolo, of the massacre of civilians in Butxa and of the macabre images of corpses abandoned in the streets. The media constantly reproduced testimonies of people who, from one day to the next, had lost everything. Putin became the villain par excellence. We heard about mercenary troops, the sinister Wagner Group and other paramilitary bands formed mainly by far-right criminals. According to Putin and his ministers, the war had to be quick. The death toll began to fall on both sides. Three years on, the war has claimed tens of thousands of lives (the latest figures put the number of deaths at 46,000 in Ukraine; Russia has always hidden its death toll) and has also created a refugee crisis of the highest magnitude, with 6.5 million refugees in other countries and another 3.7 million displaced.
The war has also caused a major geopolitical twist. In December, Zelensky welcomed Donald Trump ("Welcome, Donald", he said literally) and flattered him as "a strong man" who would surely be able to understand the suffering of the Ukrainian population. Zelensky insisted, before the European Parliament, on the need for the new Trump administration to be present at the peace negotiations table in Ukraine, even if it risked minimizing the role of ', for us the only real guarantees in the future are in NATO." It was a way of insisting on Ukraine's willingness to be welcomed by Atlanticism, requesting in passing the approval of the returned sheriff of Washington.
It must have been an exercise in possibilism, but what Zelensky did not calculate was that Europe, and Ukraine itself, would not be at the negotiating table. That what "the strong man" Trump would do would be to agree with Putin to keep the Donbas and everything else that seems convenient to him while blocking Ukraine's entry into a NATO that, on the other hand, it joined only to insult and belittle Europe, with the acquiescence of a NATO president, cowboys Trumpists. Although the outcome of the war would be a feverish arms race, also driven by Trump, which will also affect the European Union. Pedro Sánchez has already begun to do the homework that was given to him at the Paris summit: "Spain must invest in security and defence..." Three years later, anyone who thought that the beginning of the invasion was the first trumpet blast in Jericho was right.
