One year after the Russian invasion, Putin failed diplomatically: he was isolated in the United Nations and the announced "peace plan", which China outlined, must be interpreted strategically.
In truth, it is a plan that China rehearses thinking about the later.
Beijing is aware that the Russian "special operation" failed and is trying to save its interests in the new strategic world that is emerging.
He formally requested a ceasefire, but this trap is not credible: it would mean stopping the war in favor of the invader, without alluding to the need for the Russian withdrawal from the occupied territories.
China is also ambiguous: it recognizes the principle of territorial integrity, but calls for a cessation of hostilities with occupied Ukrainian lands.
For Beijing, this has its explanation: Ukraine should take into account the "security concerns of all parties."
In other words, President Xi agrees with Putin: limited sovereignties exist in the world.
At the UN the votes spoke, six countries supported Russia: Belarus, North Korea, Syria, Eritrea, Nicaragua and Mali;
141 votes condemned it and 32 countries abstained.
In the field of international politics, what has become clear is the failure of the project to restore the Soviet Empire, based on Putin's speech in 2007 - Munich Security Conference - and carried out after the invasion of Georgia in in 2008 and Crimea in 2014.
This design, based on excess, did not stop.
The invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a major objective since without it the Empire could not be reconstituted, had as its starting point the occupation of kyiv and the attempt to decapitate the political regime.
Previously, another alternative had been explored in Moscow, which, when it failed, led the Kremlin to invade.
On February 3, 2021, President Zelensky, in the name of national security, liquidated the media empire of Viktor Medvedtchouk, Moscow's man in the Ukrainian economic oligarchy and head of the pro-Russian opposition in Parliament.
As Simon Shuster pointed out in Time magazine, days after the Ukrainian President's decision, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced the dispatch of three thousand paratroopers to the Ukrainian border.
There the war would have started in Putin's head, according to the biographer of President V. Zelensky, S. Siohan, “Dans la tete d'un héros”.
( R. Laffont, 2022 ).
An adventure was beginning: a colonial war with tanks, drones, and missiles, to occupy a country that in 1994 handed over nuclear weapons to Russia, which it possessed when the Soviet Union existed, because it believed in the Russian promise to guarantee its borders.
After these episodes, which mark the anniversary of the start of the war, it will surely continue.
It is difficult to think in terms of a peace agreement, the only possibility of thinking about that scenario disappeared with China's failed management.
In Beijing, after the notifications of the American Secretary of State, A. Blinken, and the European Union, about the implications of arms deliveries to Russia, there are no signs of change.
China is not unaware that in the economic and technological war that it maintains with the US, the consolidation of a "NATO bloc" may harm its interests.
Furthermore, in Asia the image of an invading Russia is installed and that harms it.
Appearing as a partner of an imperial revisionism does not favor her.
In her battle "against the West" the image of cooperation and multilateralism is vital.
Only Africa is mostly pro-Russian, as was demonstrated at the UN, but the anti-colonial discourse clashes with the reality of Russian imperialism.
Paradoxically, it is in Africa that Russian and Chinese interests begin to collide.
Beijing offers economic aid, which is not disinterested, through the "Silk Road", but Russia sends its mercenaries from the Wagner Group who, although they are not in a position to finance infrastructure, offer a service that is of interest to many military governments and African dictatorships: protection of power elites in exchange for mining “concessions”.
It is the same group that in Moscow behaves like a military pillar of the invasion of Ukraine, that has publicly questioned the Russian military command for its performance in Ukraine.
A new stage of the war has begun.
NATO tanks arrive in Ukraine and will be a disruptive factor in a war in which air power, except for drones, has not played as prominent a role as artillery, where arsenals are the key to success, and where the factor human is vital.
Thanks to Russia, NATO emerged from the dream of strategic naivety and became clear that it was not "in a coma."
Half a century "managing crises" outside Europe, NATO has returned to its essence, Europe.
Sweden and Finland abandon neutrality and Central Europe, especially Poland, constitutes an unavoidable interlocutor.
The challenges can multiply, particularly where Moscow knows how to influence, for example in the Balkans and Moldova.
In that geography, as in others, the armies of disinformation, financed by Moscow, will multiply their presence.
In Ukraine the first world war takes place and constitutes a historical test for democracy and also contributes to a geopolitical awareness.
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