PATRIOTISM

The European left and right, with rare exceptions including, unfortunately, the Spanish UP and IU, do not stop praising the heroic patriotism of the Ukrainian president, Wolodimir Zelensky, a man of the theater turned into a political leader of a country martyred by the aggression ordered by Putin.

The president, Joe Biden, calling him a dictator; British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, accusing him of war crimes, have chosen very strong words, even unusual in diplomacy. Of course, the aggressor is ultimately Putin; The one who orders the bombings that have destroyed buildings and infrastructures is Putin; the one who has drowned Ukraine in rivers of blood, is Putin.

We believed him when he assured that he would not invade the neighboring country; we understood him when he referred to Russia's security so that NATO would not spread to Eastern Europe; we understood that it was best for Ukraine to adopt the status of a neutral country.

And suddenly we discovered that Putin was not just a lying politician, but a dictator of the worst kind, capable of saying barbarities to justify himself.

He told us that he wanted to “denazify” Ukraine without fear of ridicule, because how can Zelensky be accused of being a Nazi, who is of the Jewish religion! This is as if Teodor Herzog or Golda Meir were accused of being Nazis, but ridicule does not kill!

We also believed that war had been eradicated from Europe after the defeat of Nazism; that an era of peace would open, if not forever.

And it has been Putin who has come to deny the deep desire for peace of Europeans, as De Gaulle said, from the Atlantic to the Oural. The peace has been broken by the man who has deceived us, inventing the farce of "denazification".

Those of us who have visited Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, those of us who have friends there, some of whom only speak Russian, have found that they are all attached to the unity of their country; that they have always understood each other with their Russian neighbours, and that it has been the hand of a dictator that has created divisions. In Lugansk we saw a town of miners fraternizing with each other and their neighbors across the border. Separatism was never encouraged in Kyiv, and it is totally untrue that Russian-speakers were persecuted or imprisoned for being seditious.

The only rebels have been created by Russia to foment instability in Ukraine as a first step towards replacing the central government with a puppet group. The Iron Curtain, after the Second World War, was an obvious example of this.

The compression roller of the Russian army does not allow to imagine that Putin will lose this war. Hopefully a ceasefire will be reached, which could be understood as a glimpse of temporary mental health, on the part of the dictator.