The very same war

What we are currently witnessing regarding Iran, Ukraine and Venezuela is essentially the very same war. Its aim is to prevent, by military means, the decline of American-Western hegemony in the world, which is threatened above all by the growing strength of China. In Ukraine, the aim is to weaken Russia, an important partner of China. In Venezuela, the aim is to refuse China access to important Latin American energy reserves and resources. With its east-west and north-south energy and transport corridors, Iran is the essential link in Eurasian integration. The plan for Iran is the same as for Syria: to eliminate a sovereign and independent state and replace it with the usual mixture of a subjugated regime and a black hole.
    For the second attack being prepared against Iran Trump has deployed a third of his aircraft carrier capacity. It is inconceivable that this extremely expensive deployment could be reversed without being used or without anything being done with it. Vice President J. D. Vance recently visited Armenia and Azerbaijan to enlist their support for the attack. In Turkey and especially in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, there is concern and opposition to the risk of a major regional war planned by Washington and Israel, as it could affect their own energy facilities. Much will depend on Iran’s military response capability; on the damage it can inflict on its adversaries.
    The Iranians say they will respond in proportion to the scale of the attacks against them. They claim to have far greater missile capabilities than in last June’s 12-day war, when 45 of their missiles overcame the Israeli defence system after its interception capabilities were exhausted and overwhelmed. In addition to the United States, European countries were also involved in this system. It is not known whether the Iranian military has since restored and improved its air defences, nor what role the Russians – who are too engaged in Ukraine – and, above all, the Chinese, who are always opposed to overly obvious confrontations, may have played in this. In the worst case, Iran could block the Strait of Hormuz and trigger a serious international oil and economic crisis. There are several Russian and Chinese naval vessels in the region, which increases the risks.
    At the start of the fifth year of the war, negotiations in Ukraine are more unclear than ever. The fact that the US, the most important player in this war, is presenting itself as a “mediator” is solely due to fears that a military defeat for NATO could undermine Washington’s prestige. Trump has shifted part of the burden, namely military aid to Kiev, onto the Europeans, but apart from the financial cost, his commitment remains unchanged. The CIA and Britain’s MI6 remain very active in identifying targets and facilitating Ukrainian attacks. American and British aircraft continue to fly over the Black Sea and guide Ukrainian missiles against targets in the Russian hinterland, with little information being released about the number of civilian casualties. Kiev’s military eyes and ears remain controlled by the West. According to a report in the “New York Times”, Washington continued to assist Kiev in January in selecting targets in Russia and in attacks on Russian oil tankers in the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, with Trump being informed of these measures. The chairman of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, has threatened to deploy Russia’s weak navy to protect its merchant ships. Russia has extensive nuclear resources, but very limited naval forces, especially in the Baltic Sea.
    Following the friendly meeting between Putin and Trump in Alaska last August, Washington has made no concessions whatsoever and has not shown the slightest sign of rapprochement. It has not even responded to Russia’s proposals to extend the START agreement on nuclear arms limitation and has announced its insane decision to resume nuclear testing, which will prompt Russia to take similar measures. For all these reasons, Moscow trusts neither Trump nor the success of the negotiations. It is playing along because it has nothing to lose, but it is aware that the matter will be decided on the military front. As for the Europeans, they are doing everything in their power to torpedo this farce.
    “Russia’s maximalist demands cannot be met with a minimalist response,” explains the ever-surprising EU Foreign Affairs Representative Kaja Kallas. In her list of demands, contained in a document quoted by Radio Free Europe on 20 February, she calls for Russia to withdraw its troops from Belarus, Georgia, Armenia and Transnistria. After the war, Moscow must disarm to the same level as Ukraine, pay reparations, answer for war crimes and even hold elections in Russia under international supervision. In other words, the EU continues to dream of Russia’s “strategic defeat”, which it had envisaged at the beginning of the conflict, even though the military and economic reality does not look like that.
    The Russian delegation arrived in Geneva last week after a flight of more than six hours over Turkey, the Mediterranean and Italy, because Germany and Poland had refused to grant their plane permission to fly.
    On 7 February, an important adviser to the Russian negotiating delegation, General Vladimir Alekseev, deputy head of military intelligence, was shot dead in his Moscow apartment. The crime is attributed to the Ukrainian secret service. A squadron of F-16 fighter jets, piloted by American and Dutch soldiers, is supporting the beleaguered air defence in Kiev, even though US sources claim that these are not regular soldiers but mercenaries. Against this backdrop, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who has been withdrawn from the current negotiations by the Kremlin, expresses his scepticism about these negotiations on a daily basis. The brutal Russian bombing of energy infrastructure, which is exposing the civilian population in many Ukrainian cities to the cold, is met with widespread condemnation. However, the same practice was justified in the Kosovo War in 1999 by the notorious NATO spokesman Jamie Shea at a press conference in Brussels on 29 May of that year – opportunistically, this has since been removed from the NATO website. •

Source: ctxt.es/es/20260201/Firmas/52234/rafael-poch-guerra-venezuela-iran-eeuu-china-ucrania.htm of 23 February 2026

(Translation Current Concerns)

* Rafael Poch-de-Feliu was the first foreign correspondent for the Catalan daily newspaper “La Vanguardia” in Moscow from 1988 to 2002, and subsequently in Beijing, Berlin and Paris. He is the author of several political books and runs the blog rafael.poch.com.