From then until January 30, 2023, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights recorded more than 7,000 deaths and 11,500 injuries among men, women and children, in addition to the 8 million refugees in Western Europe, a balance that promises to escalate in the face of a stagnant war that has not shown a clear forcefulness of the parties.
Precisely, the West doubles the bet in a warm winter: supplying the German and American Leopard 2 and Abrams tanks, those that can change the balance of forces on the battlefield and unbalance the Russian adversary with potential consequences for the world.
The prolongation of the war has a much higher political cost than the Kremlin probably anticipated given the birth of a geopolitical Europe with a militaristic DNA, the German constitutional turn and the suppression of its bellicose neutrality, as well as the revitalization of ties ocean liners, and the immediate real possibility of a ninth NATO expansion with the additions of Sweden and Finland.
These far-reaching changes in the European geopolitical architecture lead to a series of questions that jump to reason. Considering the reality followed since the Second World War, will Germany stop being the dwarf in terms of foreign policy to prove its new military profile? What does it mean for Brussels that Berlin seeks a more even relationship between its geopolitical stature and its economic power? How does the fact that Olaf Scholz allocate 100,000 million euros to the armed forces and 2% of his GDP in defense matters affect the Franco-German axis? What does the German military disclosure mean for Anglo-American relations? Is Germany crossing a red line in front of the Kremlin considering the powerful German-Russian economic relations?
These far-reaching changes to the European security framework threaten to arouse Putinist ire. Poland, Finland, Norway, Spain and the Netherlands have announced that they would support kyiv by sending heavy weapons. All this promises to encourage a greater war escalation when we enter the second year of the war. In this regard, we must not forget Russia’s nuclear status, nor the danger of cornering and humiliating an adversary with the capacity for mutually assured destruction. The first alert calls that had the world on edge were the missile in Poland and the sabotage of the NordStream.