Some recall the war in Crimea when the conflict in Ukraine has taken a dangerous leap in that region. In the war of 1853 and 1854, Russia was defeated with the support of a coalition formed by the British Empire, France and the Ottoman Empire, plus the kingdom of Sardinia, which still did not exist in Italy, also supporting a theoretically neutral Austria.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Shepard Clough tells in English how Crimea started: “It was not the result of a calculated plan, nor was it the result of decisions taken under pressure at the last minute. It was the result of the regrettable mistakes made over and over again by the inept leaders who did not reflect enough on the decisions they made for more than two years.”

If there were religious conflicts, economic interests, the ambition of the authorities and geopolitical interests of the empires in Crimea, behind the battles that killed 220,000 people 150 years ago, it also happened just in these months the I that we remember on the occasion of the centenary. During the World War. Do not compare this with that of Crimea in the extermination of the population. 16 million deaths, 20 million injuries... But the Great War was also bogged down by a spark that few would have guessed that the threat that Gavrilo Prince, in Sarajevo, would have described as a disaster for Europe, the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

From one day to the next, we've realized the actuality of these old stories. A few weeks ago, the Ukrainian people were harassing their old-style governments and authorities in an attempt to strengthen ties with Western Europe. The main media erased us with the epic image of the rebels of the square baptized in Euromaida.

Later, we were surprised for the first time by the shameless Nazi attitude of many of its activists, after the awkward decisions of the new leaders after taking power, including the unofficial removal of the Russian language, which is the language of a large part of the population, and making Russia’s first military response movement, we have begun to wonder what is actually happening.

To those of us who are accustomed to the images that television gives us, the chronicles of the correspondents that have some great newspapers there have unearthed for weeks other kind of Ukraine. Regions of different cultures and languages and forms of coexistence organized over long years, plus the clashes that have arisen. Those who look more west, those who are closer to Russia, the differences that also occur in the particular configurations of the Orthodox Church, which is the dominant religion. At the same time, Ukraine was a slave.

We have learned that the counties have very different economic structures. That is, different dependencies. And that those who have mobilized the forces on both sides have been big millionaires. Magnates. Were there and are there such interests that jeopardize the division of Ukraine?

Like on the chess table

Rafael Poch, from La Vanguardia de Barcelona, sent to the city of Odessa, has written in one of his magnificent chronicles that, beginning to compare the forces that are measured in this conflict, the information front is dominated by the armies of Western media.

“Little by little,” writes Poch-, the global information machine has been launched. The machinery that turned the war in Yugoslavia into ‘humanitarian’, the invasion for the second time of foreigners from Afghanistan into ‘war on terrorism’, that machinery that sells the threat of weapons of mass destruction that Iraq had and the just reasons that there are for the outbreak of war as in one, is now working in Crimea.”

Propaganda machines, all of them, propagate the ideological layer that war needs. But when, in 1914, millions of workers from an imperial coalition and from another empire were led to die in trenches in the name of the homeland or even religion, it is known that they shed their blood for the benefit of the interests of the great bosses and the empires that sent them to the massacre. What we are now seeing in Ukraine also has geopolitics as its main component.

The West, that is, the empire that is militarily represented by NATO, which we citizens here feed on our sweat, is reorganising the world in recent years. We in Europe have known the war in the Balkans a few kilometres from us. But from Afghanistan, through Iraq, all the changes in the Maghreb regime, the war in Syria ... It's not new to that to see the West playing the beards of Russia, it's not so old in Georgia.

The other Russian Empire, in his view, pays every step back in the geostrategic area that corresponds to it. It was seen in the Balkans, in Georgia. Moldova paid for the withdrawal and lost the Transnistria camp, which has also now been remembered by the smartest journalists. What Vladimir Putin is doing in Crimea must not surprise anyone in the Nazi country.

In Ukraine, Russia’s interest is almost unnecessary to argue: it has its territory, almost as Russian as Russia, only to look on the map at what is related to culture, history, geography. And in addition, the main fuel exporting port to the West has it from here.

The latter is the main issue that arouses the longing of the West, the passing of energy sources. It is also a desire to expand the market from the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which has so far been able to take place without too many problems in Central and Eastern Europe.

Several journalists write to us from the point of view that most Ukrainians are in favour of keeping the country unified at the same time and of maintaining preferential relations with Russia. Given that a transition is not organised on it, but rather that it is a matter of blowing the flames of the conflict and of closing any path of return, one might think that the interests of geopolitics are ready to turn Ukraine into the piece of chess board movements in play by the empires.

The world, and in particular Europe, plunged into a profound economic and social crisis, have opened up populist tendencies among citizens. They're good fuels for war. Will the peacemakers be the main internal enemies to which we must quickly become homeless?

In Crimea, Russia has eaten the tower to its rival, but in the play it has left the queen uncovered. A dangerous departure is handled by employers at the expense of Europeans.