“If you want to beat us, try it. In Ukraine we haven’t started getting serious yet.”
For a moment the world forgets its divisions, and joins in mourning for the death of Shinzo Abe. The shocking and sudden news shifts attention from Ukraine to Japan. But it is only a parenthesis, because after four and a half months since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine and in the midst of the offensive on the Donbass, there is a strong echo of the challenge launched by Putin to the West: “If you want to defeat us on the pitch, try it“.”War – adds the Russian president – it has just begun, “we haven’t started getting serious yet.” Prophetic, therefore, is the sentence pronounced a week ago by the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, who announced the return of the Iron Curtain. The divisions are increasingly wide: from conflict, to the food crisis, to energy, while the transit of Russian gas through Ukraine touches an all-time low, with Putin warning about possible “catastrophic” consequences Western sanctions for the global energy market. Themes on the agenda of the G20 of Bali, where the positions are attested, in search of consensus. The degree of tension between the US and Moscow is also reflected in the conduct of diplomacy: here, therefore, the American Secretary of State in Bali Antony Blinken refuses to meet his counterpart Lavrov, who in return declares: Russia “will not run” to Washington for talks, “it is not we who have abandoned contacts, it is the United States”, denouncing the approach of Western countries part of the G20 group, while the European Union, for its part, says no to Russia’s use of the summit as a “platform for its propaganda”.
Lavrov himself, after saying that the invasion of Ukraine it is not responsible for a global food crisis and that the sanctions to isolate Moscow they amount to a declaration of war, left the meeting in Bali early. Nor is it time to negotiate on the battlefield, where bombing continues in the north, in the Kharkiv region and in the south, in Mykolaiv, while the bombing around the city of Kherson rages on. Yesterday, meanwhile, the Ukrainian army declared that it had returned to the island of snakes, while the spokesman for the Russian defense ministry announced an operational pause for the Moscow forces to “recover their fighting capabilities”. He does not specify the duration, but do not be fooled: it does not in any way mean that the battle has stopped.