Gaza, a cornered and extremely vulnerable people

Extreme scarcity and desperation define life in the Gaza Strip today. The population has been subjected to a cruel blockade by the Israeli government since 2007. Before the current crisis, after the Hamas attack on Israeli territory with taken of hostages, Gaza had already been bombed by Israel several times, killing hundreds of people and destroying many buildings. and structures. It must be remembered that the 2 million residents who live in the small territory of 375 km2 have been suffering multiple hardships. Before the current total lockdown they had lived on four hours or less of electricity a day. It had been the case for a long time that most families did not have access to clean water because the supply system was contaminated with sewage: For some school children, breakfast was a cup of hot water flavored with a pinch of salt. Today not even that. Said Omar Ghraieb, a journalist and digital media manager who lives in Gaza. "Despair is not even the right word to describe what is happening here because things are getting worse," he said. "We wake up to a world of fighting every day." For more than a decade, Palestinians living in Gaza had suffered major escalations of violence and an Israeli-imposed air and sea blockade that has decimated infrastructure, stifled economic growth and living conditions so bleak that United Nations officials They said, before the Israeli bombings, that a humanitarian disaster was inevitable.
"We are really seeing a collapse on the ground," said Matthias Schmale, director of the UN Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, which provided humanitarian assistance to more than 1.3 million refugees in the autonomous Palestinian territory.

You can imagine that some reaction from the population was inevitable. The Hamas attack, as well as other reactions of Palestinian rebellion in Gaza, were predictable.
To all of the above we must add that there are nearly 3 million Palestinians in the Western Bank of the Jordan, constantly dispossessed of land and homes due to the advance of Israeli colonies in their traditional lands. In their jobs and transfers they are permanently humiliated with controls on all the main routes in the territory. As if that were not enough, something similar is happening in the Arab and Muslim sector of Jerusalem. The Palestinians themselves, who have been incorporated into Israeli citizenship for decades, are constantly discriminated against and their rights are not taken into account. Added to the above is that there are several million Palestinian refugees in neighboring countries. Jordan, which in practice has been and is a country with a majority Palestinian population, is threatened both politically and militarily by the Israeli state. Something similar happens in the south of Lebanon and in the southwest of Syria, a country that has already lost the Golan area since the 6-day war and Yon Kippur in 1967 and 1973. Something similar can be said of Egypt, particularly on the peninsula. of Sinai, which was already occupied by Israel in 1967. There are also several million Palestinians who were forced to migrate to different countries in the world.
In this situation it seems difficult that the solution of eradication of the Palestinian population from their former territories becomes impracticable. Netanyahu's policy of taking advantage of the reaction generated by the Hamas attacks on his territory to annihilate the Palestinian population, both those actively involved in the resistance struggle and the civilian population made up mainly of women and children, has generated and is generating rejection in Arab and Muslim governments, as well as in numerous social and political organizations throughout the world. It would be easier for Netanyahu to reach an agreement with Palestinian Hamas leaders to achieve the release of hostages captured by Hamas in exchange for the release of Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons. This would allow time for Israel's political forces to rethink their relationship with the Palestinian political leaders, and advance the constitution and demarcation of an internationally recognized independent Palestinian state. While that would be the solution, it is not likely that due to the racist and Islamophobic reactions that have developed in a part of Israeli society, it can happen in the near future.
Israeli decisions are influenced by the United States, which constitutes the main economic and military support of the Israeli state, but American positions are influenced by a very politically strong pro-Israeli sector that prevents the United States from changing its position.
Meanwhile, the death toll of thousands of Palestinian victims, most of them civilians, including tens of thousands of children, seems set to continue.
At the same time the world watches with a lot of anger and a lot of helplessness.

When will oil and natural gas run out? 

The answer to this question depends on the theory we accept about the origin of oil and natural gas.

First of all, let us clarify that both oil, or rather, the different types of oil, and natural gas, made up of methane, ethane and other alkanes, are hydrocarbons, that is, compounds of carbon and hydrogen with some impurities.

If we consider that the origin is biological, that is, the accumulation of organisms, which is incorrectly called fossil hydrocarbons, both the existence of oil and natural gas would be limited to sedimentary basins.

In other words, it would be limited to a thin discontinuous layer on the earth's surface, a layer that generally has a thickness of a few hundred meters or at most several kilometers, which is something like one thousandth of the earth's radius.

The extension of these sedimentary basins is approximately 10 to 20% of the planetary surface, or about 50 to 100 million km2 depending on the criteria used to classify them.

Sedimentary basins are formed by accumulations of strata or layers that in some cases are permeable or fractured and in those cases have the capacity to contain hydrocarbons such as oil and/or natural gas.

It usually happens that the hydrocarbons formed in the mantle and at the base of the crust tend to rise due to their lower density than water and the host rocks. It must be remembered that both oil and natural gas are lighter than water, which is the fluid that is almost always present in the sedimentary subsurface.

In these cases, the permeable or fractured sedimentary formations that I mentioned earlier may be the receptors for the ascending hydrocarbonaceous fluids.

It is also important to point out that accumulations of oil and natural gas also depend on the existence of impermeable layers that can retain fluids and prevent them from escaping to the outside.

Considering that more than 30,000 million barrels of oil are extracted each year, that is, 4,700 million metric tons and 4 billion m3. of natural gas and that this extraction has existed for several decades, it can be estimated that under the terms of the biotic oil theory its exhaustion is possible even soon. I clarify that this conclusion can only be reached if we think that oil and gas are formed and only exist in sedimentary basins.

Always according to this biogenic and restrictive theory, we can think that if the extraction continues with a similar intensity, the existing deposits could be exhausted in the near future, let's say a few years or tens of years.

However, if we accept the theory of the mineral origin of hydrocarbons, the forecasts would be very different.

In the first place, the origin of oil and natural gas would take place in the upper portion of the Earth's mantle at a depth of 100 to 300 km. That is where the conditions are met for carbon and hydrogen to combine in a stable way.

That situation would be more or less continuous and would extend to the entire planet at that depth. The natural evolution of the crust would lead these fluids to rise for a long time, for example millions of years through fractures that are sometimes generated in the crust, and end up getting trapped in their ascent if they find impermeable layers. Under these conditions, deposits of both natural gas and oil can be formed.

To the above, it must be added that there are deposits in exploitation for a long time, even some that are about to be exhausted could be recharged due to the rise of fluids from lower levels.

According to this theory, the mineral or abiotic theory, the volumes of existing hydrocarbons would be at least two or three orders of magnitude higher than what would be expected if the hydrocarbons originated from organic remains.

The final conclusion is that in that case there would be no problems of depletion of oil or natural gas, and that if there were problems they would only be related to strategies or techniques related to extraction.

Indeed, although the volumes available may be almost inexhaustible, in any case, for the effective extraction of oil and natural gas there are several preconditions.

First of all, the deposits must be located. This may require geophysical studies, drilling and investments that allow reaching the exploitation of the deposits. Some deposits have technological limitations due to geological structural conditions and may require technological innovations for their exploitation to be possible.

And finally, for the decisions and exploitation plans to be carried out, governments and companies need to make economic and political decisions that are not always taken.

In other words, thinking in terms of abiotic hydrocarbons, production problems and even depletion

BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The world is changing

BRICS is an economic-commercial association of five nations, which are according to their initials Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. They are states that have a large population and/or territory and that are not part of the dominant Western European American bloc, which is the one that largely controls world finances and geopolitics.

All these nations, in addition to not belonging to the dominant Western world, have in common a large population (China and India above one thousand one hundred million, Brazil and Russia above one hundred and forty million), a huge territory (almost 38.5 million km²), this position gives them strategic continental dimensions, a gigantic amount of natural resources and, most importantly, the enormous figures they have presented for the growth of their domestic product (GDP) and participation in world trade in recent years. .

To a large extent, this new germ of a global geopolitical bloc is being consolidated as a result of the economic confrontation that has lasted more than a decade between the US and China and much more recently, after the war in Ukraine, between the US and the European Union. with Russia. In the latter case, strong sanctions have been triggered on Russia by the Western alliance. These sanctions, which can be considered draconian, prevented the Russian Federation from not only carrying out all trade, including the sale of its products, and sports and cultural boycotts, but even from paying its financial obligations.

For this reason, both China and Russia are promoting the confirmation of this new bloc, also incorporating three other regional powers, such as India, Brazil and South Africa.

In recent weeks, two more countries have requested to join the bloc, Argentina and Iran.

Several states with large population, resources or territory are also likely to want to join in the future like Kazakhstan, Algeria or Egypt or even Pakistan and Indonesia.

In fact this new organization is a continuation, or we can say an extension of the organization of non-aligned countries that emerged in 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia at that time to differentiate itself from the two existing blocs during the Cold War, the Western bloc led militarily by NATO and the Soviet bloc organized in the Warsaw Pact.

This Bandung Conference brought together 29 heads of state of the first post-colonial generation of leaders from the two continents to identify and assess the world problems of the moment, in order to develop joint policies in international relations.

Six years after Bandung, on a broader geographical basis, the Non-Aligned Movement was established at the I Summit Conference in Belgrade, held from September 1 to 6, 1961. The conference was attended by 28 countries (25 member countries and 3 observers), mainly New Independent States. Cuba was the only Latin American country participating as a member.

The movement has continued into the 21st century, in 2012 the 16th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was held in Tehran, the capital of Iran. 120 member countries participated in that summit. In September 2016, the XVII NAM summit was held on Margarita Island, Venezuela, where Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro assumed the presidency. In his inauguration speech, the president established the principles of Margarita's declaration, among which stand out: The refoundation of the UN with the votes of the NAM, the defense of the Palestinian people, the end of the blockade against Cuba, the decolonization of Puerto Rico among other great challenges of today's world.

Since 2019, the presidency of the NAM has been assumed by Azerbaijan.

Parallel to these development processes of the NAM at the end of the 20th century, several events took place that modified the political configuration and balance of power in the world. Surely, the most important fact was the dissolution of one of the two blocs that constituted the geopolitical base of the Cold War, as a direct consequence of the fall of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact.

When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, a unipolar world was created consisting of the United States and other allied states, such as Japan, Canada and Australia, and the European Union, above all organized militarily in NATO without there being any strategic military and financial organization of comparable size to oppose him.

In a way, the BRICS was a reaction to this unipolarity. The five countries began meeting in 2009 and established their headquarters in Brasilia. At that time they began to develop an embryonic organization that today is known by the acronym BRICS.

Everything indicates that the BRICS will tend to increase its economic, financial and geopolitical power as new members join. It is not a minor issue.

In reality we are witnessing a new geopolitical order at the world level and BRICS is clearly a well-defined attempt to challenge the economic, political and financial coalition of the US and the European Union.

It can be foreseen that in the next two or three years, the BRICS will be made up of a dozen countries that are clearly going to compete from the point of view of their economic and military power with the European North American Western alliance.

The world is changing and BRICS can be a fundamental factor in that change.

 

A subversive physicist and climate change

Freeman Dyson was a famous English physicist born in 1923 and died two years ago at the age of 96. He studied at Cambridge University where at the end of the war he graduated in Mathematics.

His friend, the neurologist and writer, Oliver Sacks said of Dyson: "Freeman's favorite word about science and creativity is the word subversive. He feels it's not important to be orthodox, but subversive, and that's what he's done all his life." life."

He moved to the United States, establishing himself at Birmingham University first, then at Cornell University, and finally in 1953 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he would remain for 60 years.

Dyson was one of the main personalities in physics worldwide, he participated in several projects of great importance such as the Orion Project and the Triga nuclear reactor. He also worked on a variety of topics in mathematics, including topology, analysis, number theory, and random matrices. His contributions to physics are innumerable. I invite the audience to consult his copious trajectory in the encyclopedias available on the Internet. In this video we will specifically refer to his views on climate change.

First part

In one of his many lectures, Freeman Dyson recounted that in the 1960s, fluid dynamics expert Syukuro Manabe was running global climate models on

the supercomputer at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton.

The models were executed with carbon dioxide with variable amounts in the atmosphere and in the output of the computer the models of it showed an increase in the average temperature of the soil, something that 50 years later was renamed global warming.

Munabe told everyone not to believe the numbers. But the politicians in Washington believed. They wanted numbers, he gave them numbers, so naturally they believed in numbers.

It was not unreasonable for politicians to believe in Manabe's figures. Politics and science are two very different games. In science, you're not supposed to believe the numbers until you've carefully examined the evidence. If the evidence is doubtful, a good scientist will suspend judgment. In politics, you're supposed to make decisions. Politicians are used to making decisions based on shaky evidence. They have to vote yes or no, and they usually don't have the luxury of suspending judgment. Manabe's numbers were clear and simple. They said that if carbon dioxide increases, the planet will heat up. So it was reasonable for the politicians to believe them. Believing for a politician is not the same as believing for a scientist.

Manabe's numbers were unreliable because his computer models did not actually simulate the physical processes taking place in the atmosphere. He over and over again said that his purpose when he ran computer models was not to predict the weather but to understand it. But no one listened. Everyone thought he was predicting the weather, everyone believed his numbers. And here we are still.

Second part

Earth's biosphere contains four carbon reservoirs: the atmosphere, the ocean, vegetation, and soil. All four reservoirs are of comparable size, so the problem of climate is inevitably mixed with problems of vegetation and soil. The intertwining between the four reservoirs is so strong that it makes no sense to consider only the atmosphere and the ocean. Computer models of the atmosphere and ocean, even if they can be made reliable, give at best a partial view of the problem. The large effects of vegetation and soil cannot be calculated, but must be observed and measured.

The way the problem is usually presented to the public is seriously misleading. The public is led to believe that the carbon dioxide problem has only one cause and one consequence. The only cause is the burning of (fossil) fuels, the only consequence is global warming. In reality there are multiple causes and multiple consequences. Atmospheric carbon dioxide driving global warming is just the dog's tail. The dog wagging its tail is global ecology: forests, farms, and swamps, as well as power plants, factories, and automobiles. And the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has other consequences that may be at least as important as global warming: increasing crop yields and forest growth, for example. To handle the problem intelligently, we need to understand all the causes and all the consequences.

Third part

To sum up what we've learned since then, Dyson gives us some good news and some bad news. The good news is that a lot of effort is finally being put into local observations. Local observations are laborious and time-consuming, but they are essential if we are ever to have an accurate picture of the climate. The bad news is that the climate models that so much effort goes into are not reliable because they still use simulation factors instead of physics to represent important things like evaporation and convection, clouds and rain.

In addition to the general prevalence of misleading factors, the latest and largest climate models have other flaws that make them unreliable. With one exception, they do not predict the existence of El Niño. Since El Niño is an important feature of the observed climate, any model that cannot predict it is clearly flawed. Bad news doesn't mean climate models are useless. They are, as Manabe said thirty years ago, essential tools to understand the climate. They are not yet adequate tools to predict the weather. If we patiently persevere in looking at the real world and improving the models, the time will come when we will be able to both understand and predict. Until then, we must continue to warn politicians and the public: do not believe the numbers just because they come out of a supercomputer.

Freeman J. Dyson, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, received the 1999 APS Joseph Burton Forum Award and is the author of several books on science for the general public. The most recent is The Sun, the Genome and the Internet, which will be published this year.

 Latin America breaks away from the tutelage of the US, which has increasing difficulties in managing itself

The presence of the United States, the former great dominating power in Latin America, is constantly shrinking and disappearing

After World War II, the US became the main power, both from a military, economic and political point of view.

In July 1944, when the Second World War was practically defined, a Monetary and Financial Conference was held with the assistance of 730 delegates from the 44 allied nations in the conflict at the Mount Washington Hotel, located in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, seeking regulate the international monetary and financial order after the conclusion of the War.

These were the bases for the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The following year, once the war was over, the United Nations Organization was founded, initially made up of 51 founding member states, now there are 193.

Both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as well as the UN itself established their headquarters in the United States where they still are.

The World Bank is currently headquartered at 1818 H Street NW. Washington, DC, US and is made up of 189 countries.

For its part, the IMF has its headquarters at 720 19th Street, NW, in Washington, DC and has 190 member states.

Similarly, the UN, founded on October 24, 1945 in San Francisco, California, established its headquarters at 760 United Nations Plaza, Manhattan, New York City. Originally there were 51 Member States in 1945 today there are 193

The World Bank Group or World Bank Group, which was created in 1944 as part of the Bretton Woods Agreements, also has its headquarters in the city of Washington at 1818 H Street NW in the US capital. It is made up of 189 countries.

For their part, at the regional level and shortly after the end of the War, in 1948, the countries of the American continent also agreed to establish an international organization. This was finalized at a meeting in Bogotá, where the Organization of American States was created. As it could not be otherwise, they also established the headquarters in Washington.

on 17th Street corner Constitution Ave of that city.

It is currently made up of 35 member states.

In addition to the OAS, on April 8, 1959, the Inter-American Development Bank was created and, of course, its headquarters were located at 1300 New York Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. The IDB currently has 48 members.

All these institutions that in a certain way shaped and shape a leadership spectrum at the highest economic and political level of a global and continental character. They are all located in the US and of course that way the US is in the best position to control them.

And we must insist that it is in these institutions that strategies, incentives and limits are defined for everyone, and

much more particularly for the entire American continent.

Due to this historical and circumstantial context, the control that the US exercised and to a certain extent still exercises over all the states of Latin America was almost total, leaving no room for the governments of the area to make their own decisions.

100 years before they had taken over half of Mexico, from 1898 they occupied Cuba for more than two decades, Haiti was also occupied from 1915 to 1934, the occupation in the Dominican Republic lasted 8 years, from 1916 to 1924 and Puerto Rico that was occupied in 1898 and whose occupation still continues 125 years later,

In 1903 the US promoted the separation of Panama from Colombia in order to build the interoceanic canal including a territorial strip on both sides of it.

In that period, they defined and even directly designated most of the governments of Mesoamerica, bloodily opposing the revolutionary attempts that occurred. In that period including the Mexican revolution of the decade of 1910-20, and the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua from 1927 to 1933.

With the creation of the OAS, US policies in relation to Latin America did not change, OAS officials acted as if they occupied a lower level secretariat in the US government itself.

In 1954 the US had overthrown the progressive Jacobo Arbenz government in Guatemala and a few years later, in 1961, they tried to carry out a coup in Cuba where a revolutionary government led by Fidel Castro had been established since 1959, failing completely.

The attempts continued in the following years, they invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965 against another government that was not to their liking, they started a war to overthrow a revolutionary government in Nicaragua in 1979 to 1990 which they only partially succeeded in, they also invaded the small island Grenada in 1983 to displace a government that made them uncomfortable, and in 1989 they invaded Panama kidnapping its president. The president of Panama named Manuel Noriega was taken to the US to stand trial and was sentenced to 40 years in prison, which was later reduced to 20. He was finally extradited to France and Panama, continuing in prison until his death in 2017. ,

Everything seemed to indicate that this almost total US domination over Latin America would continue indefinitely. But things have been gradually changing.

Incredibly, the government of the Cuban revolution has been resisting sanctions and sabotage for 63 years, in 1998 there was a change of government after which Hugo Chavez took office, who was a president clearly opposed to the interests of the United States in Venezuela and his successor Nicolás Maduro also it resists despite sabotage and sanctions and at the same time Nicaragua was returning to its revolutionary Sandinista roots.

To continue weakening US control in recent years, the left recently won several elections, first in Mexico with López Obrador, also in Bolivia, with Evo Morales and Luis Arce, then in Argentina with Alberto Fernández, and more recently in Chile with Gabriel Boris, in Peru with Pedro Castillo and in Honduras with Xiomara Castro.

At this time, it is thought that Brazil and Colombia are about to change their governments, electing leaders with clear progressive orientations who could continue to expand this trend.

Political evolution does not seem to stop, rather it accelerates. No Latin American country followed the US and Europe in sanctions against Russia, and now, recently, most Latin American states did not attend or were reluctant at the continental Summit organized by the US in Los Angeles.

It seems that the influence of the United States in the Latin American subcontinent is weakening, and that there is no longer that all-powerful economic and political influence that was the rule in the past.

I don't know if this situation reflects the empowerment of Latin American countries or the accelerated weakening of North American power. Maybe both.

We do not know what will happen in the next few years, but we will probably witness a continuation of these processes and perhaps, hopefully, we will witness a radical and historical insubordination of the South Americans who may finally be able to become masters of their own destinations.

 

 

Europe: the continent of never ending wars

Europe is the only continent that is not a continent, because its territory, which extends for 10,531,000 square kilometers, has no limits to the east. Just a couple of mountain ranges, which are easily traversable.

It is rather a large choppy peninsula with a high population density that in turn has several smaller peninsulas also with many people inhabiting them.

Well, those people for a long time developed different histories and cultures and later, when they had enough power, they dedicated themselves to expanding in all directions they could and, as much as possible, seizing many territories, towns, and cities in various parts of the world.

Culturally and politically, Europe fragmented, reconstituted itself and fragmented again over and over again, until now forming a multitude of culturally identifiable states that managed to obtain and preserve their independence and their language, after many efforts and struggles.

During the last centuries and even much earlier, but especially since the beginning of the 20th century and that is what we are going to talk about, this fragmentation and realignment caused numerous wars, some of them very bloody.

Let's say that since the beginning of the 20th century in Europe there have been 20 wars ranging from civil wars in a single country where there was usually also the involvement of external forces to wars that included several countries in destructive military alliances that ended with millions of deaths and a lot of destruction.

The first European wars of the century took place in the Balkans, when various provinces of the Ottoman Empire united in the Balkan League, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Greece and Serbia faced the army of the sultanate in 1912 and later, after having defeated it, they faced each other. yes to distribute the territories abandoned by the Ottomans (1913).

A year later a continental war broke out, a generalized war throughout Europe, which also covered colonial territories that had been conquered by some European states in other parts of the world, this war was what was called the First World War or the Great War.

Almost all governments were in this war. On one side was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany, the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Bulgaria and on the other an alliance of France, the United Kingdom, the Tsarist Russian Empire and Italy. The United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, Belgium and several other countries later joined the latter group. As can be seen, practically all of Europe was immersed in this great conflict with profound consequences including the death of 20 million and many others injured and a great deal of destruction.

As a result of this war, the European political geography underwent several modifications with the dissolution of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires and the advent of the Bolshevik regime in Russia. In the course of the war, other local wars took place such as the persecution of Greeks and Armenians in Turkey and the Irish rebellion against the United Kingdom in 1916.

Shortly after the war ended, the Greco-Turkish War broke out in 1919-1922, the Polish-Soviet War in 1920, and Italy's colonial war with Ethiopia in 1935-36.

From 1936 to 1939 there was also a civil war in Spain with the intervention of foreign powers (Germany and Italy) and a war between Finland and the Soviet Union (1939).

In 1939 a general war broke out again in almost all of Europe due to the invasion of neighboring countries by Germany with Italy as an ally and in the Far East the support and imperial initiative of Japan.

The allies made up of the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, the United States, France and China confronted this German-Italo-Japanese axis. The axis of Germany and its partners was supported by the kingdoms of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, as well as Albania, Slovakia, Croatia, Bohemia and Moravia, etc. The allies for their part involved Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Canada, and a few other countries.

 As a result of this war in 1945 the axis powers were defeated, some 70 to 80 million people died, there was a lot of destruction and the political borders of the continent changed. Old countries disappeared and borders substantially changed, for example, Germany lost Pomerania and Konigsberg, which were transferred to Poland and the USSR, respectively, the Yugoslav Federation and East Germany appeared, the so-called people's and socialist republics of Eastern Europe were constituted, such as Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Baltic republics, etc.

In the following years, some European countries continued with their colonial wars, the United Kingdom in India and Kenya, France in Vietnam and Algeria, and Portugal in Angola and Mozambique.

From 1991 to 1999 new wars were unleashed in Yugoslavia, first in Croatia, then in Bosnia and finally in Kosovo. The federation was dissolved, fragmented into several pieces. Where there was one state there are now seven states: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Kosovo.

In those same years, several local wars broke out in Georgia with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, with the support of Russia, and in the Caucasus between Armenia and Azerbaijan (1988-1994 and 2021).

Finally, in 2022, the war that currently occupies the headlines of the press was triggered, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine due to the declaration of independence of Luhansk and Donetsk and the change of regime in kyiv in 2014.

Several states, in particular the entire European Union, NATO, the US and several allies, such as Canada, Australia, Japan, Republic of Korea, were indirectly incorporated into this conflict through sanctions and military aid.

The conclusion that in the European continent, extremely fragmented from the political and cultural point of view, there is a tendency to resolve conflicts by armed means.

Time passes and this trend seems to continue.

It is increasingly difficult for European societies to interpret the deep meaning of the word peace, every time conflicting economic or political interests or ambitious personal leaderships appear, Europeans tend to seek solutions through war.

And that sad behavior continues.

 Uncertainties in the political future of Ukraine

Europe is experiencing a situation that we can define as dramatic. The old and new nationalisms face each other, revive events of the past, show segregationist and discriminatory attitudes, and in extreme cases even confront each other militarily. These types of situations have triggered fierce conflicts with many deaths and injuries, destruction of homes and infrastructure and even disarticulation of the economy and social dismemberment.

That is what is happening in Ukraine and that has led to a war, which for now only involved Russia and Ukraine, but which may directly or indirectly affect other states that have or may have political or military interests in the conflict. This has been proven by the extent of the involvement of the European Union and the US in the Ukrainian situation, through sanctions against Russia and military assistance to the Ukrainian government.

It is important to remember that Ukraine is located in a border area of ​​former European empires. A part of the country, the west, remained under the control of the Austrian empire until 1917. The rest of the country was integrated into the territory controlled by tsarist Russia.

The Ukrainian population was part of the linguistic continuum of East Slavic cultures that encompassed the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian languages. The Ukrainian language had not had a chance to establish itself institutionally as an official language, and Russian became the most widely used language, particularly after the Bolshevik and Soviet revolution. Although the Soviet government promoted the national languages ​​throughout the territory, it gave prominence to Russian, which was the lingua franca of the entire confederation.

For its part, it should be remembered that Ukraine is a very large country. It has an area of ​​603,628 km2, which makes it the second largest country in Europe after Russia. It has a population of 41.3 million inhabitants concentrated in some urban areas, in particular in kyiv, its capital, where 3.5 million inhabitants live.

Because the Soviet multilingual policies, referred to above, were only patchily maintained, there were periods when it was the Russian language that prevailed in education and administration. As a result of this situation, when Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1992, it was in practice a bilingual country where a high percentage of the population, more than half, had been educated in Russian and therefore expressed themselves Usually in that language.

This situation continued intermittently until 2014, when there was a change of government in which a party with strong nationalist tendencies and anti-Russian sentiments prevailed.

In a few years, we arrived at the current situation.

While Ukrainian is the native language of 67.5% of the population, the Russian language is spoken by almost the entire population and is the native language of 29.6%.

Most of the native Russian speakers live in the southeastern provinces (the Donbass) with an area of ​​53,201 km2 and 6.2 million inhabitants.

Precisely, in the provinces of Donbass, 80% of the population speaks Russian and 17% Ukrainian.

When the nationalist government took power in kyiv, it began to require the Ukrainian language in school teaching and in administrative procedures, banning the Russian language.

This decision produced a strong reaction in the southeastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk where predominantly Russian was spoken. Militias were created and quickly these provinces were organized and unilaterally declared their independence with the respective names of the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic. For informative purposes, I point out that Donetsk has an area of ​​26,517 km2 and 4,100,000 inhabitants and Luhansk has 26,684 km2 and 2,100,000. The main cities of both provinces are respectively Donetsk with 900,000 inhabitants and Luhansk with 400,000.

An even more illustrative situation regarding this ethnic-linguistic predominance of Russian occurred in Crimea, where the Russian-speaking population constituted 84% of the population, and in the face of the installation of the nationalist government in kyiv, which imposed the Ukrainian language, decided to hold a referendum to join the Russian Federation that was finally approved by 96.7% of the voters, leading to the integration of Crimea into Russia.

The Ukrainian government protested against the incorporation of Crimea into Russia but nevertheless did not attempt any forceful measures to prevent it. His attitude was different towards the rebellious provinces of Eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian army advanced militarily to regain control of these territories but only achieved partial success in an offensive that caused thousands of deaths and injuries but ended in an impasse that was formalized in the so-called Minsk agreements.

Although with brief interruptions, this pause continued until February of this year (2022).

The Russian government had not interfered directly in the conflict, although in some way it had collaborated by allowing border exchanges and sending some help, perhaps even of a military nature, but without recognizing these new republics and without intervening in the confrontations.

At the same time, the Ukrainian government had requested the intervention of the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States, countries that quickly agreed to collaborate both economically and militarily. Based on this support, the Ukrainian government began a military invasion of Donetz and Luhansk, which was ultimately the drop in water that caused Russia's intervention, triggering the military operation or invasion that has been going on for more than 3 months.

In fact, given the regional and international geopolitical context, it seems that the main risk for Ukraine is not only the occupation of part of its territory by Russia, but also the very survival of the Ukrainian state itself.

The provinces of the southeast, what is called the Donbass, are clearly sympathetic to the Russian military operation while other regions of the south, such as Kherson and even Odessa, are likely to fold in support of this advance by the pro-Russian armies.

In the rest of Ukraine, the situation is different. Clearly, in large areas, the population has long developed anti-Russian sentiments making it difficult or even impossible for pro-Russian forces to advance north and west.

Perhaps the problem would become more serious if, under the pretext of collaborating with the Ukrainian government, the Polish army intervened in the regions that had previously been under its sovereignty, such as Lviv (Lvov) and Galicia.

Similarly there is a significant Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia near the Hungarian border which could add political instabilities to that region.

In conclusion, in the future of Ukraine there are many uncertainties that are not only those introduced by the Kremlin with the invasion currently underway.