The effects of the war of Russia in Ukraine. The speech by Giuseppe Spadafora, vice president of an enterprise
In the perfect storm after two years in which the world has practically stopped waiting for the pandemic to pass and in the consequent economic crisis, which began before the pandemic and which was already affecting the whole industrialized world, Russian invasion of Ukraine has laid the concrete foundations for establishing a new diplomatic economic world order, with new zones of influence, new economic relations and new diplomatic agreements and economic sanctions, the swift blockade or the feared closure of the internet will be of little use.
Russia has its own RUNET data network, Russia has almost zero public debt “around 20% of GDP”, Russia can make payments and receive money outside the Swift system. This does not mean that there will be no problems, evidently there will be but largely only for Russian citizens, certainly not for Putin and the downgrading of the rating agencies will be useless, which then towards whom and what
The problems will be for those who have assets outside Russia, such as Italian banks and worse still will be European citizens, Italy in the lead to suffer from the increase in gas, oil and consequently for the increase in raw materials and basic necessities such as bread, milk pasta fruit and vegetables.
The story will tell that Western Europeans, for manifest inability to interpret the signals launched by the Russians in 30 years, on a cold morning in late February woke up under Russian bombs, dumbfounded and horrified by the invasion of a sovereign nation bordering on Russia and NATO.
The story will tell of an absolute president named Putin who for no apparent reason orders his army to invade neighboring Ukraine causing death and destruction and all this to enlarge the territories of his Russian Federation.
I do not know, however, if history will recall the evolution, which lasted almost thirty years, of Putin’s certainly not insane diplomacy towards the rest of the world and the total lack of diplomatic strategy on the part of the EU states which at best have traveled to on its own, crashing into a reality that was growing day by day and that at the beginning of 2022 placed Russia as a strategic military economic leader in three quarters of Africa and in much of Asia.
But how strong Russia was we understood on 23 and 24 October 2019 in Sochi during the first historic Russia-Africa summit in all 54 continental countries, 43 of which with the heads of state. And even if our good Di Maio runs to Algeria to buy gas, not for his own vision and choice “which is usually required of the head of diplomacy of a state” but ordered by the Prime Minister, it will be of little use because the true leader in africa and Putin. Just in Algeria in 2006, Putin canceled a debt of 4.7 billion dollars in exchange for military contracts for several billionaires for Rosoboronexport and contracts in the energy sector between Gazprom and Sonatrach.
As we know, Russia is also present in Libya where, supporting the government of Tobruk and Khalifa Haftar, through the private military company Wagner and then there is Egypt, where Russian exports are worth over 40 billion and the merchant fleet of Moscow is the third user of the Suez Canal. For the Russians, the Suez Canal is the main link to the Black Sea through which almost 300 million tons passed in 2021. In addition to the business on the Canal, Russia sells grain to the Egyptians and has armaments supplies for 6 billion dollars, as well as the construction of a nuclear power plant in the El Dabaa region. In order not to miss anything, in Angola Russia has opened the fourth largest diamond mine in the world but we find Renova, by Viktor Vekselberg, in South Africa, Rusal, by Oleg Deripaska, in Guinea,
Faced with this scenario, perhaps the EU will have a jolt and a surge of pride to redefine its role, asphyxiated at the moment, in the world scenario in which we now represent little compared to China, India but also Brazil, Russia itself and some African nations.
