Those who are older yesterday were reminded of Rockefeller by the President of the United States. Not the founder of the US industrial dynasty, but the animated puppet – an anthropomorphic raven in tails – voiced by ventriloquist José Luis Moreno and which had some success on Italian TV in the 1980s.

The Kremlin ventriloquist

In yesterday’s speech against Zelensky – summary: he is an illegitimate and discredited president, responsible for the war and its deaths – Trump lent his voice and toupee to the Kremlin ventriloquist, repeating verbatim the accusations that Russian propaganda has been hurling since 24 February 2022 against the man guilty of not fleeing Kyiv and of organising a resistance, which the whole world thought impossible and which has gone on for three years despite the limited and conditional aid received from Europe and the United States, amounting to some $250 billion, with a significant preponderance of European aid (132 versus 114 billion).

To give an order of magnitude, in three years, aid to Ukraine amounted to 0.2% of the total GDP of the US and EU member states. We haven’t exactly swooned. And considering what is at stake on that frontier of Europe and the democratic West, we have been self-defeatingly stingy. To defend Ukraine yes, but not to the extent of making Russia lose, now there is a guy in the White House who has no qualms about making the aggressed lose and the aggressors win.

The spoliation agreement to carve up Ukraine

Trump, who in negotiations has the ethics and aesthetics of a mafia boss, wants to close a mutually beneficial agreement with Putin on the spoliation of Ukraine, keeping some business for himself – the reconstruction and exploitation of resources, starting with rare earths – and leaving the political business to Putin, i.e. the resettlement of a Russian protectorate in the land of a people and a nation whose identity the Russians, long before Putin, have denied and have no problem planning to erase.

Against this backdrop, Draghi’s words in the European Parliament yesterday easily sound prophetic. It will be Europe’s turn to defend itself and Ukraine, without counting on support that until the last American presidential elections could be taken for granted and whose absence we must now take for granted, as long as Trump has a Congress of figures at his disposal, willing to obey his orders, even the most infamous and grotesque.

For the sake of accuracy, one should add that Europe will be forced to play not only without, but also against America, because today Putin’s and Trump’s are different, but equally convergent designs against Ukraine and Europe.

Draghi’s admonition to conceive of Europe as a single state, i.e. as a political community bound in a single destiny, should be addressed to the political leaderships of the EU member states rather than to the elected officials in Brussels, to whom the former ECB chief spoke, or to the heads of the common institutions. These are countries that Trump is aiming to divide in order to destroy what little European unity resists in a continent infiltrated by decades of hybrid warfare, but which the imminence of the danger calls to historical responsibility.