President Volodymyr Zelensky, who timidly declared that he did not believe in a Russian invasion, is the big loser in this chess game. For believing that the United States and NATO would allow him to crush his fellow citizens in the Donbass, he is losing this region. His popularity in Ukraine has plummeted to 23%.

While the situation in the Donbass is becoming more and more incandescent, Biden, on the eve of his talks with Putin, has convened on February 11 what is in fact the war council of NATO and the European Union: NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, Polish President Andrzej Duda, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, flanked by European Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

The Nato-EU war council made it clear that "if Russia carries out a further invasion of Ukraine, the United States, together with its Allies and partners, will respond decisively and impose immediate and severe costs on Russia." This is what Biden said the next day to Putin, on behalf not only of the United States but of NATO and the European Union. Total rejection of any negotiation, in fact a declaration of war, signed by Italy at the hands of Mario Draghi under the eyes of a silent and consenting Parliament.

Every day more and more signals of imminent war are intensifying. The State Department is evacuating the Embassy in Kiev, leaving only a few diplomats and a team of Marines, and warns U.S. citizens to leave Ukraine because "it would not be able to protect them from Russian attack". So did the Foreign Ministry. The Pentagon is withdrawing 160 military instructors from Ukraine, who trained Kiev forces. However, there remain military advisers and instructors belonging to the US and NATO Special Forces, which have de facto the direction of the Army and the National Guard in Kiev.

In the forefront is the neo-Nazi battalion Azov, already distinguished for its ferocity against the Russian populations of the Donbass, promoted for its merits to a mechanized regiment of special forces, armed and trained by NATO. It has the same insignia as the Panzer SS Das Reich Division, one of Hitler’s 200 divisions that invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. They were defeated, but the price paid by the Soviet Union was very high: about 27 million dead, more than half civilians, corresponding to 15% of the population (in relation to 0.3% of the U.S. throughout the Second World War), about 5 million deported to Germany, more than 1,700 cities and large towns, 70,000 small villages, 30,000 factories destroyed.

All this is dangerously forgotten, while Russia continues to repeat, speaking to the wind, that it does not intend to attack Ukraine and denounces the increasing concentration of Kiev’s troops in front of the area of Donbass inhabited by Russian populations. Here Kiev has deployed over 150,000 soldiers. They are equipped with Grad rocket launchers, each capable of launching up to 40 km, in a salvo of 20 seconds, 40 122 mm rockets with high-explosive warheads that, deflagrating, invest a large area with thousands of sharp metal fragments or small delayed burst bombs. A large-scale attack with such weapons against the Russian inhabitants of Donetsk and Lugansk regions would cause a massacre and could not be stopped by the local forces consisting of about 35 thousand men.

The war could explode with a false flag operation. Moscow denounces the presence in Donbass of US mercenaries with chemical weapons. The fuse could be a provocation, such as an attack on a Ukrainian settlement, attributed to the Russians of the Donbass that would be attacked by the overpowering forces of Kiev. The Russian Federation has warned that, in such a situation, it would not stand by and watch, but would intervene in defense of the Russians of the Donbass, destroying the attacking forces.

In this way, a war would explode in the heart of Europe, to the advantage of the United States, which, through NATO, to which 21 of the 27 EU countries belong, and through the collaboration of the European Union itself, would bring Europe back to a situation similar, but even more dangerous, than that of the Cold War, strengthening the US influence and presence in the European region.

Manlio Dinucci
Source
Il Manifesto (Italy)