A year ago the horizon that opened the invasion of Ukraine was very dark.
Few believed in the veracity of Putin's threats and in the invasion itself, despite warnings from US intelligence about the real possibility of it.
But once it happened, even fewer believed that Ukraine would resist, that Putin's armies would suffer resounding defeats, and that a year later only the immense pain of the irreparable and the loss of thousands of lives would overshadow the most vivid hope in the future. which is maintained above all within the country: confidence in winning the war is the vast majority response among the Ukrainians themselves.
The second army in the world, the first nuclear power in number of warheads and the country with the largest territorial extension and strategic depth on the planet has crashed and discredited the illegal aggression ordered by its president against its neighbor, and not only has it not achieved any of the objectives it had set itself, but has led to exactly the opposite.
The United States has returned to its transatlantic commitment with Europe when its preferred strategy was competition with China and now leads the military and financial aid in favor of Ukraine, NATO has begun a new enlargement with the candidacies of Finland and Sweden, the European Union it has multiplied its strategic capacity with its sanctions against Russia (the last package approved yesterday at dawn),
In a year, Putin has already lost this war, although its outcome is still unpredictable and therefore knowing whether Ukraine will be able to win it.
With its dwindling military, its economy strained by the largest round of sanctions in history, and its international image in ruins, Russia has no plans for the future other than to perpetuate the war until its allies are exhausted, cause disunity, and exhaust the resilience of a population now strongly united behind Zelensky.
Hence Putin's interest in a long war of attrition, which keeps the war sore open and grips the Europeans and their economies.
Nothing would be better than a quick Russian defeat in the spring offensive now brewing,
so that it was the Kremlin that demanded a negotiation to stop the loss of territory and try to save Crimea and, above all, Sevastopol, the crucial port that houses the Black Sea fleet.
The shortage of ammunition and weapons in Ukraine, especially tanks, artillery and long-range missiles, will in no way help shorten the war, quite the contrary: it will favor the strategy of delivering cannon fodder that Putin follows with his own soldiers, in a gruesome repetition of the European fronts of the War of 14.
A year later, Ukraine is a popular cause in Europe and in much of the world.
It is even, even clandestinely, in Russia itself, where this year's balance is the most sinister in its recent history.
The loopholes of freedom that still existed a year ago have been ruthlessly crushed and with very high jail sentences for any public display of dissent or questioning of the war, which is still not officially in the country.
Militarization, police control, and mass incarceration continue to function as mechanisms for the subjugation of a methodically uninformed population.
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The few countries that support him in the United Nations votes are dictatorships and even China is reluctant to vote with Russia, which reserves its right to veto in the Security Council.
The peace plan made public by China on the same day as the first anniversary avoids, once again, distinguishing between invader and invaded, but reaffirms the preservation of the territorial integrity of the States that Putin has broken.
The skepticism that both the US and NATO have expressed rests on China's abstentions from UN condemnations of Putin's aggression.
Zelensky on Friday advanced his willingness to meet with both President Xi Jinping and Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who has also raised an international mediation platform.
If Putin's defeat does not mean Zelensky's victory, Ukraine's victory must not mean Russia's defeat.
In addition to believing in the victory of democracy, as the Kiev government asks its allies, in order to achieve it, peace must also be prepared, since it is not enough to name it and desire it.
And in the peace of the European order that emerged from the war, it is necessary to guarantee both the future security of Ukraine and the place and the European role that corresponds to a sovereign Russia.
It makes perfect sense, in either case, for the initiative to create an international tribunal to try Putin and his high military commanders for the crime of aggression, the type used precisely in Nuremberg against Nazism, to prosper, even if it is in absentia. .
The value of that judgment would be threefold:
