Ukraine, the second moment
Analysing, observing and thinking about a significant event requires a certain perspective. I have let a year of the war in Ukraine pass, as the situation obviously got complicated for Putin already in the initial phase of the game.
But in Russian military history problems of this kind are recorded in the strategic memory of this people who proficiently cultivate the art of the use of time in space. They are good chess players. And as we all know, chess is a problem machine that relates spatial control...in terms of available time to solve complex game situations.
So I refer back to my earlier observation and thoughts on the Ukrainian issue of 12 February 2022 and repeat myself: it is likely that the Russian objective is not the one we can imagine in the West. Both Putin and President Xi use strategic time scales that are not the ones we use.
I am therefore surprised that British intelligence reports almost as a triumph that Russian troops are defensively entrenched in the territory of the Donbas. Perhaps that is a major objective of the Russian move south... not the only one, but a very significant one.
At the present time we are waiting for a Ukrainian counter-offensive to develop. Perhaps we are on the verge of surprising things, perhaps the business of reconstruction of the Ukrainian territory has begun prematurely. The Russians have flattened cities and infrastructure, now a period of reconstruction should begin.
Whoever benefits from this will be the winner of the ongoing war. In this way we continue to witness the dilution of nation states, at least in the West, and their consolidation in Eastern Eurasia. In the West, the relationship between war and corporate business is growing, but we cannot say that it has only recently been invented. The great failure of Athens in the Peloponnesian War was to gamble strategically in terms of business on the conquest of Sicily. That thunderous failure (we still hear it from those of us who study these matters) permanently blighted its performance in the war against Sparta. The strategic gambles being made by the West bring us closer to a dangerous zone where a possible scenario would be precisely a scenario analogous to the failure of the Athenian expedition to Sicily. The Athenians did not lose the war the day after the failure of the expedition, the consequences of that defeat caused them to lose the confidence of their allies, the operational capability of their fleet and they were finally defeated by the Spartans in the military field in which they, the Athenians, were strategically dominant.
For now, these are the observations that, as an archaeologist and palynologist interested in the present and the future, I am making to the kind readers of this unpublicised and very modest blog.
Igor Parra
en Burgos a 240 metros de la tumba del Cid y doña Jimena
