© 2025 FdR / RES CANONICA
A Europe that has lost its sense of tragedy sheds crocodile tears over the possible agreement between the United States and Russia on Ukraine. Government leaders, who are accustomed to defining the young people who have fallen on the battlefields as heroes and not as victims, say they are scandalised by the terms of the hypothetical agreement. They forget that peace is dictated by the victors. Even when it is not fair.
I am forced to repeat myself: they have made a joke of Ukraine. Everyone, and from the very beginning. Written on 22 June 2022, for the avoidance of doubt. This doesn't make my words any more true, but it does attest, in the coherence of my view of this theatre of war, the pity I feel for the Ukrainian people. This pity is not enough, however, to relieve them of their responsibilities, because the victims also have their own. Among the most burdensome is having believed that President Joe Biden's United States cared about Ukraine. It didn't give a damn.
Biden and his administration were motivated by an anti-Russian obsession, which was very easy to document, and which found the necessary fuel in the hyper-nationalism of some Ukrainian circles. It cannot be ruled out that the USA seriously thought it could win the war thanks to such a willingness to fight and make sacrifices.
Disguised as an epic clash between Good and Evil, between democracy and oppression, freedom and enslavement, the war took away at least a generation of Ukrainians, whom Europe celebrated as heroes. It was convenient: it avoided the embarrassment of considering them victims of a fever that produced only hallucinations.
Ukraine is no more important to President Donald Trump than it was to his predecessor. He has simply realised that, on the ground, Russia has won. Those who denounce the end of the international order as we knew it forget that peace has always been dictated by the victors. It has not always been a just peace. Nor will this one be.
The alternative? Europe goes to war. It does so with its own soldiers, not with others'. Because this is the peculiar thing about war: it tolerates all hypocrisy and indeed feeds on it voraciously, but in the end it forces even the most hypocritical to drop their masks.
Left in their underwear by the cynical neorealism (or realistic nihilism) of the Trump administration, European governments can only cry over the spilt milk of their misrepresentations. If they had the courage, they would curse the day when, faced with a Russia threatening to enter the war, they decided it was the only good and just thing left to do. Or rather, to have done. By the Ukrainians, that is.
(gianluca grossi)