Diversified interests will prolong the war between Russia and Ukraine

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine is not a fight for an ideology, but for commercial and geopolitical interests, and has represented a round business for the United States, university academics pointed out.

In the analysis round table Russia-Ukraine Conflict: balance and resonances a year after the beginning of tensions, organized at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences (FCPyS) of the UNAM, the professor of this academic entity Talya Işcan expressed: in this war the powers that have a strong arms race profit, but mainly the American Union does it.

It is not a simple scenario where Russia is the "monster" that wants to expand. "Those stories were in fashion many centuries ago; today they are more complex scenarios that involve diversified aspects and interests, on a local, regional, and global scale."

Given the conflict "we should have a more neutral vision rather than saying that it is Vladimir Putin's war and that the Americans are the 'good guys'; we must adopt a multidimensional vision" and ask ourselves where is the pacification discourse of the European Union, for example; with so many issues on the agenda, this war is going to last for many more years", Talya Işcan considered.

The expert mentioned that we are talking about a war that has lasted a year, "but if you count the antecedents, I would mark the initial date in 1991, with the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the main antecedent of separatist state conflicts in the region surrounding today's Russia".

Meanwhile, it has been a great challenge for Ukraine to develop as a sovereign state; along the way it has undergone drastic changes regarding its foreign policy, and in establishing who it approaches, who will be its allies or its enemies; therefore, we are talking about a multidimensional scenario full of dilemmas, she pointed out.

At the round table organized by the Project Resonances of Militarization in Human Security in the 21st Century, Guadalupe Michelle Balderas Escutia, from the Graduate Program in Political and Social Sciences at UNAM, and professor of the Open University and Distance Education System of the FCPyS, emphasized:

There has been a continuous shipment of arms to Ukraine by Western countries, particularly the US, for whom it is big business, which is in addition to the economic aid received by the Ukrainians to continue the war. "The aid to that country and the sanctions towards Russia are trying to exert pressure and cause the conflict to continue to drag on, and we don't know when it will end."

The war did not start a year ago; it was announced at least eight years ago and can be traced back much further, to the times of the formation of the new republics after the disintegration of the USSR, and the formation of the political and economic elites in each country, he agreed.

The conflict cannot be understood without three main elements: the strategic military deployment; the safeguarding of security and energy infrastructure in Eurasia, and the social and cultural part. The first refers to the high military technology and the development of weapons; the second to the fact that Russia is positioned as the eighth country in proven oil reserves and the first oil producer on a world scale, in addition to having first place in proven natural gas reserves; and the third to the socio-spatial configuration of Russian domination through the use of historical memory, language, media, culture, and religion, he said.

In turn, Federico José Saracho López, professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UNAM, argued that this conflict cannot be easily traced; a year after the invasion, there are large capitals and bourgeoisie that are making profits. "The war between Russia and Ukraine has been openly used for the enrichment of the techno capitalist, militarist bourgeoisie of the global north and of the United States in particular."

The official Russian sources speak of six thousand soldiers fallen on the battlefront; those of the US estimate 100 thousand. On the Ukrainian side, the Kyiv government recognizes 13,000 killed, while the Americans say there are close to 100,000. Meanwhile, the United Nations Organization referred last December to seven thousand civilian deaths but recognizes that the figures are false because there is no way to carry out a survey and put observers on the front. Moreover, the category of civilians and soldiers in Ukraine is blurred because many men were forced to join the defense of their territory to ensure the departure of their families to the surrounding countries.

According to figures from UNHCR, the UN Agency for Refugees, there are seven million 915 thousand people in that condition, four million 900 of them have temporary protection; there are another 5.9 million internally displaced persons. "The real damage is incalculable; millions of lives have been disrupted by the conflict" and even the environment has been affected.

The war is in every sense a disaster, except for a handful of people who have decided to burn a piece of the world and their fellow human beings to generate a profit. It is larceny and as long as the analysis of the conflict does not contain that dimension, "we will be accomplices by omission", said Saracho.

For Ana Teresa Gutiérrez del Cid, professor at the Xochimilco campus of the Autonomous Metropolitan University, the argument that this conflict is due to commercial and geopolitical interests was confirmed after a year.

The pandemic left the US in difficult economic conditions; it also has an enormous internal and external debt, and to get out of that situation there is nothing better than to feed the US military complex with arms sales.

More than half of the military aid received by Ukraine, equivalent to approximately 25 billion dollars, comes from the US, although some sources estimate it to be 40 billion. "The war is escalating and the question is how far it will go."

The United States took Russia out of the European gas market, which was selling mainly to Germany, a country that, not having cheap gas, is no longer growing in the same way. In addition, many German factories have left for the United States because of the lack of energy. It is a complete victory for the neighboring country to the north.