That was just four, five weeks ago. Russia’s defeat now seemed obvious. There were even rumors about an upcoming coup in the impregnable walls of the Kremlin. Or Vladimir Putin terminally ill, or worse, insane. There RUkrainian existence, heroic, blocked the muddy paths to the tanks with Z at the top. Young Siberian soldiers perished in the Ukrainian wheat fields in an impossible attempt to conquer the villages of Dombassa. In the cellars of Azovstal, Mariupol’s massive steel mill, hundreds of enigmatic British secret agents helped the Azov Battalion fight to the bitter end. Meanwhile in Moscow, sanctions have begun to crush the economy and power.

Then suddenly the scenario changed. Now the Russians are advancing on Dombass, talking about a slow but deadly pincer maneuver that will take over the Lugansk and Donetsk regions and drive Ukrainian forces out of control. Azovstal has fallen, Mariupol is firmly in the hands of the Russians, Kherson too. Kharkiv, the country’s second largest city, is again under threat and under attack. And the sanctions in Moscow hardly produce the pyrotechnic effects that Western propaganda claims. Russia is huge and its resources won’t run out anytime soon. And the wheat deal, which was completely undervalued from the start, is boosting Putin’s bargaining power.

In short, what happened? Which, as usual, oppositional fanfare, re-launched by our own politico-media tribalisms (where analyzes are replaced by choirs of ultras from both factions) obscured reality. This is a huge, very long conflict in which there are no easy winners or losers. Russia is gradually demonstrating its military superiority, and the Ukrainians are desperately asking NATO for more weapons to resist. Thus, the West is at a crossroads: to leave the Ukrainians to their fate, pushing them to surrender Dombass and sit down at the truce table, or to actually arm them even more, giving them heavy and long-range weapons, tanks and rocket batteries. Sliding even further into what Professor Orsini is already doing, not Moni Ovadia, not some aged anti-American pacifist, but one of the princes of geopolitics on television, Dario Fabbri, defines “a proxy clash between the US and Russia on the territory of Ukraine” . This does not at all mean a humiliation of the extraordinary military spirit of those who were attacked, but a statement that the conflict immediately crossed these boundaries and took the form of a genuine war of systems. between blocks. That’s why choices will affect our future like never before.