Putin Has Lost Touch With Reality , Says Gustavo de Arístegui.

Gustavo de Arístegui comes from a long-standing diplomatic background, his father and grandfather were both senior diplomats posted as ambassadors in Latin America, Europe and the Middle East. Gustavo de Arístegui expresses his views and the consequences of the Russia Ukraine war.

Gustavo de Arístegui - Spanish Politician

The diplomat Gustavo de Arístegui analyses the difficult situation that the war in Ukraine is causing. The international affairs expert criticized the aggressive stance taken by the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and assessed the significance it could have.

In Russia, the overwhelming majority of public opinion supports this action. Gustavo de Arístegui has been listening practically all night and day, to the most relevant international channels and their most reputable experts on Russian affairs who are all Russians and Ukrainians by birth and education, and there is certainly wishful thinking in the West that thinks that the majority of the Russian population is against the war. There is indeed a minority, not a small one, who is and who do not demonstrate because they are repressed, and also because the overwhelming majority of the media in Russia is dominated by people very close to the Kremlin. That said, to think that this demonstration of people against the war in Ukraine, against the invasion of a sovereign country, is a majority in Russian society is frankly a chimera, and he thinks it is very irresponsible to insist on this. You have to understand the mentality of Russians, Russians are deeply nationalistic, and they are severely humiliated when the Soviet Union implodes, and as is well known, it is a public issue. The greatest tragedy for Russia was the implosion of the Soviet Union, and that is engraved in blood and fire in the head of someone who knows the East-West confrontation like no one else.

Let’s remember that for many years Vladimir Putin was the head of the KGB station in Berlin, and he was the strong man who gave instructions to the Stasi, he was the one who knew perfectly well about the confrontation at the hottest point of the planet, the East-West confrontation, which was precisely Berlin, and this is in Putin’s head, and this is guiding all his actions and strategies. The moment, Putin has been scheming these issues since 99, it was very clear in his mind that no kind of regime that was not purely pro-Russian could be tolerated on Russia’s borders, and that is why he stabilized Georgia in 2008, says Gustavo de Arístegui.

Putin started saying that Georgia was going to join the European Union and NATO, and he started putting up NATO and EU flags everywhere, in Tbilisi and everywhere. In Georgia there was a blitzkrieg, Russia took Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and declared them independent. Today they are Russian republics. It did the same with Crimea, absolutely nothing happened. Russia has militiamen in the Donbas who are not Russian militiamen or ethnic Russian Ukrainians who took up arms; they are Russian soldiers without uniforms. That is the reality of things. Putin has amassed 190,000 men, not 10,000. 190,000 men in the vicinity of Ukraine to make the coordinated attack that he has just made in the north, east and south. He is deploying Chechen commandos in Kiev who are looking for President Zelensky and you have to understand something else, for the Russians and above all for Putin, the Maidan revolution, the Maidan Square revolution was an anti-Russian coup d’état. President Yanukovich, who had just been elected, was overthrown by the masses in Maidan Square, and the minds of all Russians, but above all in Putin’s mind, this was a machination of the West and the United States in particular, of NATO as a whole, to have in Ukraine an element to control and permanently destabilize Russia. Therefore, in the distorted mentality, because Gustavo de Arístegui believes that to a large extent what some analysts who know Russia well say is true, Putin has lost touch with reality. He believes that what he is doing is an act of self-defense to ensure Russia’s survival and stability in the future, says the former diplomat. Now we have to consider what the consequences of all this will be. It would not be unthinkable, something that was unimaginable just a year or two ago, that two neutral countries. One that has made neutrality its national essence, that its axis should end up being integrated in one way or another into the NATO structure, it should be remembered, by the way, that Sweden, being a neutral country, is the country that has been most effectively integrated into the actions in Afghanistan, in coordination with NATO, with its excellent special forces and its very experienced air force.

On the other hand, the only country in the world that has defeated the Soviet Union in a conventional war in Finland, and that is why it was neutralized because Finland wanted to be part of the West and it was a demand of the Soviet Union in the post-World War II period that Finland was not a member of the Atlantic Alliance and was consequently neutralized. The moment, Finland has been accustomed to being on the neutral side from 1945 to the present day. It might well begin to think about the benefits of being covered by Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. Then there are, of course, the economic consequences.

Gustavo de Arístegui

According to Gustavo de Arístegui, there are serious consequences. Russia is one of the world’s leading producers of aluminum. Russia is one of the world’s leading producers of phosphate. Russia is one of the world’s leading producers of titanium. All these elements are essential for food security, especially for modern industry, and this means that other countries that have these resources will gain enormously on the international stage. For example, Norway, which has extraordinary reserves of titanium, vanadium, and even phosphates that have just been discovered, or Morocco itself, which is the world’s leading producer of phosphates, is also going to play an important role in replacing Russian phosphates. In other words, we are beginning to enter an extraordinarily complex war in which three elements, or three fundamental pillars, come together. The geo-economic one, which Gustavo de Arístegui had just discovered, the geo-strategic one, which is in full swing at the moment, and the geopolitical one, which is the broadest one, which is going to define how we are going to shape the world in the coming decades. What seems clear is that the order of security, strategy and balance that emerged from the Second World War has been destroyed. What is going to happen, whatever happens in the Ukrainian war, whether or not Russia wins in the long or short term, Gustavo de Arístegui thinks it is clear that it is going to win because it is minutes away from being able to overthrow the Ukrainian government and put in its place a puppet government, which is what it wanted. The balance of geopolitical forces in the world has changed forever, and we have to understand that very clearly.

It is very important that we also understand the rivalries that exist between China and Russia. They have some common issues, for example, they have common rivals and common adversaries. Right now for Russia, the enemy is the West. China in that sense is going to become the economic lifeline of sanctioned Russia, but at the same time, they are rivals on many other things. China and Russia have been sworn enemies in many places in the world, and I would like to name one, for example, from Southeast Asia in the Vietnam War, Laos, Burma, and all of Southeast Asia. China was always on opposite sides of the battle for conquest and domination of countries. It is not so clear, that just because China is a rival of the West, does not mean that China is automatically Russia’s best ally and friend. There will be nuances. This brings us to a fourth reflection, the fourth reflection is the change in the political models we know, that is, there is a certain decline in the model of liberal representative democracies. There is an emergence of a new type of regime to which communist China is no stranger, which is what we might call strongman populism. In the past, dictatorships were overwhelmingly ideologically inspired. The Stalinist communist dictatorship, the Nazi monstrous communist dictatorship and the fascist monstrous dictatorship and so on. Ideology plus personalist, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, made them particularly dangerous characters. Today we are in a completely different phase. Strongman populism makes the strongman, the dictator generates his ideology, and this is very important for us to understand. He uses ideology in different degrees, they are always the same case, it is obvious that, in China, the strength of the Communist Party is extraordinary, but that Xi Jinping is a communist, nobody doubts that, however, he is a communist leader or if one wants to call him a dictator or whatever one wants to call him. He is of a Different type than Mao Zedong or his successors. This strongman populism is beginning to spread in different parts of the world. We are seeing it in Turkey, which is a NATO country, we are seeing it emerge in some European countries such as Hungary, and this system is going to spread to more and more countries because the population, with these economic uncertainties, pandemics, wars, in short, the deep crises in all areas that are beginning to take root and reunify, will look to the populist.