Features

from the editor

War in times of pandemic

While this month our main focus is on cli­mate is­sues here in Cat­alo­nia, else­where all the worst pre­dic­tions have come true and war, in all its cru­elty, has bro­ken out again in Eu­rope. The Russ­ian in­va­sion of Ukraine, falsely at­trib­uted by Putin’s regime to a war on Nazism, is caus­ing a human tragedy: thou­sands of deaths, cities de­stroyed, eco­nomic hard­ship. For the first time, how­ever, the EU has de­cided to go be­yond its tra­di­tional cos­metic sanc­tions and ap­proved a pack­age of eco­nomic mea­sures that will un­doubt­edly cause very se­ri­ous prob­lems in Rus­sia.

Ukrain­ian courage in the face of the Russ­ian in­va­sion has be­come a global phe­nom­e­non, pos­si­bly be­cause it is also a war in which so­cial media and in­for­ma­tion have be­come very valu­able and ac­tive tools.

The Pres­i­dent of Ukraine, Volodymyr Ze­len­sky, a for­mer actor turned politi­cian, has shown great skill in using di­rect com­mu­ni­ca­tion and so­cial media, and has clearly de­feated the Russ­ian pres­i­dent in the war of the in­ter­na­tional nar­ra­tive.

It is too early to as­sess the con­se­quences of this tragedy, and to know how de­te­ri­o­rated Rus­sia’s global po­si­tion will be. How­ever, every­one seems to agree on one thing: this war has buried the era that began with the col­lapse of the So­viet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and ush­ered in a new one, in which the world’s su­per­pow­ers once more use in­tim­i­da­tion to re­late to one an­other. It is also a new era in which the emerg­ing su­per­power, China, threat­ens to re­place the old one, the United States.

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