“Politically and strategically, Russia has already lost the war”

The Chief of the Defense Staff (JEMAD), Admiral General Teodoro López Calderónhas shown this Tuesday convinced that “Russia has already lost the war in the political and strategic aspects or levels”. At a breakfast offered by the New Economy Forum in Madrid, the main operational chief of the Armed Forces has assured that it can be considered “also as a sign of weakness” the “recourse to threatening nuclear rhetoric” by Vladimir Putin and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.

The JEMAD has devoted a central part of his speech, before an audience made up mostly of businessmen from the Defense sector, to commenting on the current moment of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, outlining the dimension of Putin’s Russia as a threat for the West.

In the Ukraine war, “the Kremlin’s total revisionism seeks to replace the current rule-based world order with another order based on force”, has theorized. In this attempt to change the world order, she has also pointed to China as an interested power, and that “it represents a systemic challenge to our conception of the world.

Admiral Lopez Calderon has ruled out “a short-term surrender of Ukraine” and less unconditionally. “I don’t see a lasting ceasefire -she explained-; It is unlikely because Ukraine is seeing that its resistance capabilities are greater than what was anticipated at the beginning of the conflict, and therefore Russia is rethinking its objectives.

In an episode of his lecture devoted to future of natoand with an eye on the ever closer Atlantic Alliance summit in MadridLópez Calderón has predicted that the military organization will change the Strategic Concept that it developed and has followed since 2010, reinforcing the first of the pact’s objectives: deterrence and collective defense.

In that 2010 planning, he recalled, “NATO spoke of Russia as a country with which dialogue and cooperation had to be fostered”. that concept “has been overtaken by events”. In the new strategic vision that comes out of the Madrid summit, “there is no doubt that Russia will be considered a threat,” he predicted.

Regarding the future of the invasion of Ukraine, López Calderón believes that Russia made “a miscalculation”. In his opinion, “it is possible that he made an analysis that there was weakness in the Western world.” That analysis would have been based on perceiving the United States with its focus on the Pacific and the China Sea, Europe in discussion and under the effects of Brexit, the European Union and NATO with internal dissension… and also based in the abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan. but Russia “A reaction was found that I had not anticipated and a union in which the small differences have been parked”, he said.

For this reason, he insisted Russia “no longer got away with it. Strategically and politically he has lost this war, “and has not achieved” his goal of destabilizing the West, “or the imperial-based approach to attack, although he may achieve” some tactical success, as connect Russian territory with Crimea”.

“Three months ago I would have said here that the world would be tripolar, but now it is no longer going to be,” explained the JEMAD. The world will be bipolar, because Russia has missed the opportunity from being an important voice, it has been discredited”.

The JEMAD has advocated an increase in defense spending. “Seeing what happened in Ukraine” has argued that “it has become clear that in terms of dissuasion an investment, which is expensive, it is less expensive than an armed conflict; and if that conflict is lost the cost is unbearable’.

López Calderón has barely spent time talking about Morocco, Algeria and the SaharaAnd yes to the growing presence in the Sahel of Russian irregular forces in the form of private security companies, with the risk that they “take advantage of for their objectives” the training that Europe has given to soldiers from countries such as Mali or Burkina Faso. “Russia -he considered- is projecting her influence on the southern flank” of the Alliance.

Asked by this newspaper, the head of the Defense Staff has downplayed the turn taken by the Government by accepting Morocco’s autonomy plan for Western Sahara as “serious, credible and realistic”. This gesture “does not imply a tacit or express acceptance of the Moroccan nature of the Sahara”, he said.