False friends

You didn't need the Washington Post's two-part series to realise that Ukraine had been doomed to disaster and tragedy by those who had stirred it to war. Things Faccia wrote in unsuspected times, when writing them was unthinkable, but not impossible.

Faccia da Reporter delivered his convictions in a post dated 14 June 2022, with the title We Joked. It was not too early to realise it, it was too early to say it. Nevertheless, we wrote it and that's what happened.

Ukraine entered the shadows of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, but in the shadows it would have ended up anyway. Everyone, the US in the first place and Europe in tow as always, expected the so-called counteroffensive to produce miracles on the ground, regardless of the cost in terms of human lives on the Ukrainian side.

The Washington Post's two-part series highlights two key aspects. The first: the war against Russia was and is managed and conceived by the US. The second: disagreements and misunderstandings, not to say rifts, soon developed between the US and the Ukrainian military and political leadership.

Europe? Watching, from the window.

Today there is talk of a stalemate on the ground, of a frozen conflict with Russians and Ukrainians looking on from their mutual trenches.

Unfortunately and tragically again, this is a way of saying that the Ukrainians are in pieces.

The responsibility? Of the Ukrainians, certainly and without a doubt, for having believed that the war would solve the war. Not only them, however, on the contrary: the responsibility lies with those (the US and Europe) who led the Ukrainians to believe that they could defeat Moscow's troops and that doing so would be the only way out of the disaster. It was, instead, the threshold crossed.

A lie of enormous dimensions, which only false friends know how to utter.

Are these thoughts of absolution for Russia?

No, no one comes out of this tragedy absolved.

(gianluca grossi)