Relations are becoming more and more strained… Already eight months have passed since Vladimir Putin launched the assault on Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine. The Russian Head of State does not tighten his grip and still bombards the country he has been threatening for several years. But facing him, his rival does not give up and intends to fight until the end. A tenacity on both sides that worries the planet more and more, especially since the attack on the Crimean Bridge, considered a very important strategic point in the conflict. An attack of which everyone still does not know who is the author.
The Russians accuse Ukraine of a terrorist attack, and the Ukrainians accuse Russia of having attacked the bridge itself, in order to give it a pretext to open the third world war. But are we really risking a third edition of one of the most tragic events of the 20th century? Olivier Kempf, director of the strategic synthesis firm La Vigie and associate researcher at the Foundation for Strategic Research, gave some answers to our colleagues from West France.
Everything to avoid the Third World War
For him, the risks of World War III “are negligible. There is something that has changed radically since the First and Second World Wars, it is the nuclear factor. And this is in particular what explains why what we called the ‘cold war’ was a confrontation with a global dimension but which did not lead to a war”. However, Russia is a nuclear actor and it would be for this reason that “the Europeans and the Americans provide fairly direct support to Ukraine but do not want to engage on the ground, for fear of escalating”. “We especially do not want to enter into direct confrontations between nuclear powers”says Olivier Kempf.
An opinion shared by Emmanuel Macron. Indeed, the President of the French Republic took over his Twitter account this Wednesday, October 12 to try to reassure the French and the whole world. “We don’t want a world war”he assured before specifying: “We help Ukraine to resist on its soil, never to attack Russia. Vladimir Putin must stop this war and respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine”.
We don’t want a world war.
—Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) October 12, 2022
See also: Emmanuel Macron: why Tiphaine, Brigitte’s daughter, considers him “crazy”?
RF