It was not a blitzkrieg, it is not just a positional war, it will not end overnight as even some pundits, politicians and citizens bewildered by pro-Russian propaganda who say they are tired of this conflict. As if Ukrainians, on the other hand, enjoy fighting to defend their territorial integrity, their freedom from the barbaric invasion of the Russian Federation that continues to systematically strike civilian targets to the complete indifference of the good souls of the West. With this war of liberation of Ukraine we must come to terms. And begin to draw some lessons some, admittedly already imparted to us unnecessarily in the past from the tragic history of the twentieth century
1)Never underestimate writings, speeches, statements of dictators, reading them in the light of our ideas. They say what they want to accomplish and sooner or later they accomplish it. It was so with Hitler who anticipated everything in Mein Kampf. It is so with Putin who has never given up on reconstituting what was the Soviet empire to overcome vil trauma of its collapse from which the Russian despot has never recovered. It will be so with Beijing, which wants to destroy Taiwan's free and democratic regime and subject it to Chinese dictatorial capital-communism. It may be so with the Iran and its Middle Eastern tentacles that wants the destruction of the State of Israel
2)Never allow dictatorial regimes to violate international law with impunity even in seemingly irrelevant geopolitical arenas. If their abuse of power is tolerated, totalitarian regimes feel empowered to continue attacking peoples and invading territories .This was the case with Putin's military shenanigans in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Georgia and then Crimea. A slow, unpunished escalation that made him believe he could conquer Ukraine as well. If humiliating concessions were made to Kyiv, the Russian despot would feel empowered to continue in his perverse design, striking Moldova if not even provoking border incidents with NATO countries. Same goes for Syria, which used chemical weapons and, unpunished, initiated a monstrous massacre of its population. And what will happen if the Chinese genocide of the Uighurs continues to be tolerated?
3)Mild economic, financial, trade and technological sanctions are a blunt weapon in an interconnected world. They often end up harming both the populations of the sanctioned countries and those of the sanctioning strata, without affecting, indeed sometimes strengthening, the power of totalitarian regimes that through the use of force impose whatever suffering on their citizens.
4)The above-mentioned sanctions can only work if they are very harsh, if they are applied not in stages but promptly so as to cause immediate shocks, and if, above all, they do not become a sieve. Effective controls and harsh punishments are needed to prevent their circumvention even by companies from the sanctioning countries or their allies. Russia continues to take advantage of a wide range of suppliers, states and individuals, who enrich themselves by violating sanctions and allow Moscow to reshape its economy.
5)Military support to a friendly country must be convinced, massive, of quality and not with droppers. Subject to the technical time required to train the military in the use of warfare apparatus, supplies must enable the attacked country to react in a timely manner to prevent the aggressor, especially if it has a very large population to send to its death, from slowly sapping the victim's resistance. Ukraine could have contained the advance of Russian troops, reduced the number of its military killed or wounded, and carried out a more incisive counteroffensive if it had been provided with modern and powerful weaponry tools immediately.
6)Almost all wars now are hybrid. But the West seems to fight them by relying only on conventional means and not making adequate use of the tools of information, psychology, information technology, and, above all, crafty politics to vacuum around the aggressor. In these 22 months, Russia has invested heavily in disinformation, corrupting minds, and spreading fake news, without suffering similar treatment from those on Ukraine's side. The result is that the front of Putin's sympathizers and friends in these months has not only not weakened but in some cases strengthened.
7)The West is in danger of succumbing or having its role as defender of freedoms and democracies eroded if internally it does not stoke the fire of these ideals that must be taught from an early age, cultivated in all possible forms, reacting with determination against those who want to suppress them even at home. If the old and new generations become accustomed to thinking that freedom and democracy are fresh water and not an achievement to be defended at all costs, if apathy or indifference to the founding values of our free civil and political communities develops, we will have destroyed the immune system of our civilization and we will be victims of any aggression by regimes that want to eliminate freedom and democracy at home but also at the homes of others.
8)We have been wrong in the past to think that we could export democracy even to countries and cultures that have histories very different from ours. We have been wrong for at least a decade now not to realize that there is an attempt underway to have us import dictatorships, authoritarian models, from states that are actively fighting against our ideals and are making inroads into a disoriented public opinion.
9)The coming decades will be increasingly characterized by a clash between democratic and free states and autocratic and dictatorial regimes. The latter continue to increase their advantages and grow stronger because the West has granted them great opportunities for enrichment without demanding any guarantees of democratization for their populations in return. Basically, we have been foraging our adversaries.
10)To defend the civilizational achievements that cost us two world wars, we cannot rely only on the wealth-generating power of capitalism in its various forms. What is needed above all is an ideal awakening, a strong soul supplement to Europe and garlic states, a less self-defeating and more proud vision of our identity, a way of dialoguing with those who are different from us that does not exchange respect for the choices of other peoples and regimes for psychological subservience to them or, worse, with self-defeating flogging of ourselves
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