Ukraine, Minuto Rizzo (NATO): “Fierce war, let’s hope Putin chooses himself from the dream”

Russia is not losing the war in Ukraine, which has entered “a ferocious phase”, the risk is that this “slow destruction will continue for a long time to come, unless Vladimir Putin wakes up from his dream”. A month after the start of the Moscow ‘special military operation’, Alessandro Minuto Rizzo, former deputy secretary general of NATO and president of the NATO Foundation, takes stock of the events since 24 February with Adnkronos. And he clarifies with absolute firmness that on the part of the Alliance there must be no ambiguity: “What he is doing is right, he must not go further”. “At the moment I don’t think we can say that Russia is losing – he says – What we can see is that the initial advance did not go as expected. The World War II army is in great difficulty, as there are great difficulties. in planning. The ferocious phase has therefore begun, the bad phase, with the Kremlin wanting to punish the Ukrainians for the resistance they have opposed and which they did not expect “. According to Minuto Rizzo, “the Russians are making the Russians, using artillery and cannons to level the cities, then sending the army when they have practically destroyed everything, as they have done in other places”, in Chechnya for example, “and this implies the loss of a large number of human lives “. The opinion of the former NATO number two is that” the ferocious war of slow destruction will continue to advance unless something intervenes, perhaps the common sense of Putin, who has been deceived ” with respect to the possibility of success of a blitzkrieg, “he has deluded himself that he is the tsar, but if one goes to read his biography, he will see that he is a very concrete and shrewd man”. “And the day he wakes up from his dream – Minuto Rizzo wishes – the day someone tells him that he won’t go down in history, then he can settle for Ukrainian neutrality”. Among other things, observes the ambassador, “if it were true that he is losing, this would increase Putin’s danger, because he would have no other path than an escalation, the Russian stalemate makes everything more dangerous”. to remove, on the eve of the summit of NATO leaders, the scenarios on a possible “ambiguity” of the Alliance regarding its commitment to the conflict, as requested for example by Poland, which in recent days had also launched a proposal for a peacekeeping mission . “On the part of NATO – he says – there must be no ambiguity, it is doing very well to do what it does now, to give humanitarian aid, technical assistance and even weapons, but then that’s enough”.