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If I were Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky I would be going home consumed with doubts. The Bürgenstock peace conference cements the idea that the West has only been fooling around with this war delegated to Ukraine. It still does so today, the final day of the summit, forcing the word 'peace' into a political partouze of listless intent.
I would have liked to write that, at last, someone has dared to utter the word 'peace': Switzerland first, scattering it everywhere, this word, particularly on the group photo placards placed behind the shoulders of the political leaders attending the Bürgenstock conference. Not a few of these leaders have been glorifying one word for over two years: war.
he first is the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, who spoke at the press conference forcing her listeners to overdose on the word 'peace'. The Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, followed suit.
Now, do they find out? Do they now pronounce it, the word 'peace', after having forced it into exile reserved for swearing? After calling those who dared to utter it traitors or collaborationists?
The Bürgenstock conference, unlike what we are reading and hearing in the media, did not restore course dignity to the word 'peace' and the idea it embodies.
It emptied it of what little content it had left.
If I were President Volodymyr Zelensky I would be returning home consumed by doubts.
The first: whether, one day, peace will be between Russia and Ukraine will not correspond to the (now officially archived) ten-point plan to which Zelensky has delegated his political survival.
The second doubt: the West has not finished considering Ukraine the theatre in which to work Russia's flanks with the aim of consigning it to geopolitical irrelevance.
The third doubt is Russia. Switzerland discovered at the Bürgenstock that Moscow would have to be involved in the negotiations one day. Between now and then, peace will suffer the semantic inflation to which it was officially forced at the Bürgenstock: it will mean nothing.
It will only be the negligible product of the effort expended in a political partouze, consumed in the dark for those who did not want to look, in the sunlight for those who dared to look.
(gianluca grossi)