A new “Iron Curtain” created in Europe

(Paris) A new “Cold War”, a country threatened with being “wiped off the map” and the specter of a nuclear “apocalypse”: since the Russian offensive in Ukraine, Europe has brutally returned to division confrontation between blocks and the war.

“A new iron curtain has come down and separates Russia from the civilized world,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, cornered by Russian forces at the gates of Kiev.

From 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Europe had already been cut between the Soviet “East” and the Western “West”. “From Stettin [Pologne] on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended on the continent”, launched the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in March 1946.

Seventy-five years later, the President and Commander-in-Chief of Russia, Vladimir Putin, no longer hides his objective in Ukraine: to overthrow the pro-Western power in place and bring Ukraine back into the bosom of Russia.

“It’s an attempt to violently move the borders in Europe, or even perhaps to wipe an entire country off the world map,” said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

“What Putin wants is the submission of Ukraine and he will apparently continue his offensive until the end”, adds the head of French diplomacy, Jean-Yves Le Drian.

“A turning point”

From Nazi Germany’s offensive against the Soviet Union in 1941 to the division of Europe dictated by the Yalta conference in 1945, the Russian offensive goes back to the darkest hours of the 20^and century in Europe.

The invasion of Ukraine constitutes a “turning point in the history of Europe”, it will have “lasting, profound consequences on our lives” and “on the geopolitics of our continent”, predicts French President Emmanuel Macron.

If Russia “gobbles up” Ukraine, NATO and Russia will find themselves directly in contact along a new line connecting the Baltic States to Romania and Bulgaria, passing through Poland.

On each side of this line, troops and heavy equipment will once again face each other, the United States and NATO having announced the sending of thousands of soldiers to their Eastern European allies, all from the former Soviet glaze.

With the reinforcement of 7,000 men announced Thursday, the United States will have more than 90,000 troops in Europe. France will accelerate the deployment of troops in Romania and Italy has said it is ready to deploy 3,400 additional soldiers in Eastern Europe.

Belarus, another ex-Soviet republic from where Russian troops went to attack Ukraine and where Moscow could station forces, including nuclear forces, permanently after a constitutional referendum called on Sunday, is once again becoming also a “satellite” of Moscow.

“Spheres of Influence”

“The war against Ukraine is going to have a lot of repercussions on the whole axis that goes from the Baltic to the Black Sea”, underlines Jean-Sylvestre Mongrenier, expert at the Thomas More Institute.

“The pressure on Poland and the Baltic States will be much stronger. We can very well imagine Putin demanding free passage from Lithuania to access the enclave of Kaliningrad, for example,” he says.

France also expressed concern on Friday about a possible extension of the Russian offensive to Moldova and Georgia, two other former Soviet republics including pro-Russian separatist territories. One of them, Transdniestria, in Moldova, has a Russian military base in its “capital” Tiraspol very close to the Ukrainian port of Odessa, notes a good expert on the matter.

For US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the master of the Kremlin not only wants to “reconstitute the Soviet empire” but also “restore the sphere of influence” of Russia in the countries which were once part of the Soviet glacis and which have now joined the Alliance.

“Now if it comes to a threat beyond the borders of Ukraine, [Poutine] will find something very powerful in its path. It’s Article 5 of NATO. An attack on one is an attack on all”, underlines Antony Blinken in reference to the obligation of mutual assistance between members of the Alliance.

For his part, the master of the Kremlin promised “terrible consequences” to all those who thwart his plans, in reference to the Russian nuclear arsenal.

“Vladimir Putin must also understand that the Atlantic Alliance is a nuclear alliance,” replied Jean-Yves Le Drian, brutally putting nuclear deterrence back on the agenda in the East-West relationship.