By: Ricardo Abud
There are moments in history that repeat themselves like distorted echoes, carrying with them the same existential essence but dressed in different clothes.
October 1962 wasn't just a missile crisis; it was the moment the world understood that the survival of nations isn't negotiated, it's defended. John F. Kennedy, faced with the reality of Soviet missiles 145 kilometers off the coast of Florida, didn't hesitate: "This can't be." It wasn't a matter of national pride or imperial hegemony. It was, in its purest essence, an instinct for national survival.
Sixty years later, from the Russian steppes to the golden domes of the Kremlin, the same primordial cry resonates. But this time, the missiles aren't aimed from a Caribbean island toward Washington; they're aimed from the lands that for centuries have been considered the spiritual home of Russian civilization toward Moscow.
To understand the logic that drove the military operation in Ukraine, it is necessary to delve into the Russian soul, into that profound understanding of what civilizational survival means. Ukraine is not, for Russia, simply a neighboring country. It is the womb of East Slavic identity, the place where Vladimir I of kyiv embraced Orthodox Christianity in 988, laying the spiritual foundations of what would eventually become the Russian Empire.
Imagining Western missiles 600 kilometers from Moscow isn't just a military nightmare; it's an existential wound. It's as if someone placed guns in your kindergarten, pointing them at your bedroom window. Distance isn't measured just in kilometers, but in centuries of shared history, in millions of mass graves, in the blood shed together against invaders from the West.
Kennedy was right in 1962, and that truth transcends ideologies and political systems. When national survival is at stake, when the capacity for annihilation comes too close to the heart of power, all nations react the same way: with the iron determination of those who have nothing more to lose than their own existence.
The Cuban missile crisis wasn't resolved with speeches at the UN or economic sanctions. It was resolved when two leaders, staring down the nuclear abyss, understood that there were red lines that couldn't be crossed. Kennedy didn't negotiate over whether Soviet missiles had a right to be in Cuba; he negotiated their immediate and unconditional withdrawal.
Why should it be any different when the roles are reversed? Why shouldn't the same logic that justified the blockade of Cuba justify intervention in Ukraine?
From the Kremlin, the world looks different. It's seen from the perspective of a civilization that has survived the Mongol invasions, Napoleon, Hitler, and the Cold War. A civilization that has learned, through suffering and bloodshed, that survival isn't begged for; it's secured.
NATO's eastward expansion was not perceived as a simple defensive alliance, but as the slow strangulation of a great power. Each new member, each new base, each new missile system was another turn of the screw in a geopolitical tourniquet that, from the Russian perspective, had as its sole objective the strategic suffocation of Russia.
Volodymyr Zelensky, the second-rate actor turned president, became the symbol of this existential threat. Not out of personal malice, but because he represented the embodiment of the Russian nightmare: a Ukrainian leader willing to turn his country into the Western spearhead against Russia in exchange for promises of Euro-Atlantic integration that, for many in Moscow, sounded more like siren songs than real guarantees of prosperity.
The conflict with Ukraine was not a decision taken lightly. It was the culmination of decades of geopolitical frustration, of ignored warnings, of systematically crossed red lines. It was the moment when the Russian elite came to the conclusion that words had lost their power and only the language of force remained.
This was not a war of conquest in the traditional sense, but a preemptive war in the purest sense: strike before being struck, ensure survival before survival becomes impossible.
As Ukraine bleeds on the battlefields, the West has responded not with the total commitment required by an existential war, but with a calculated trickle-down strategy that reveals the fundamental hypocrisy of its position. European arsenals have emptied their stores of obsolete weapons, sending Ukraine not the best of its military technology, but the remnants of decades past: Leopard 1 tanks from the 1960s, artillery systems that should be in museums, and missiles whose effectiveness is more symbolic than real.
This isn't generosity; it's a military inventory cleanup disguised as international solidarity. While European leaders pose for the cameras delivering "aid packages," they are literally shipping military scrap that needed to be disposed of anyway. It's an elegant way to renew their arsenals while appearing to defend democracy.
Europe, once the center of global power, has become the most pathetic spectacle of contemporary geopolitics: a continent of nations that have lost all capacity for independent strategic thought. From Berlin to Paris, from Rome to Madrid, European leaders have abdicated their intellectual sovereignty, becoming mere amplifiers of the established discourse in Washington.
Where is the European strategic vision? Where is the independent analysis of what is truly in Europe's best interest in this conflict? Nonexistent. Instead, we find a chorus of voices repeating the same slogans, as if European geopolitical thinking had died in 1945 and never been resurrected.
France, which under de Gaulle had the audacity to defy both the United States and the Soviet Union, now trails behind decisions made in Washington. Germany, the continent's economic powerhouse, acts as if it has no interests of its own to defend, deliberately destroying its energy ties with Russia under external pressure, as if German prosperity were an acceptable sacrifice on the altar of Atlantic orthodoxy.
From the Russian perspective, Western support for Ukraine reveals an uncomfortable truth: the West is willing to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian, but not to the last Western soldier. It is a proxy war at its most cynical, with Ukraine serving as a battleground for settling geopolitical scores that extend far beyond its borders.
The weapons systems sent to kyiv are not enough to win the war, but they are enough to prolong it. It is a deliberate strategy of attrition that seeks to weaken Russia without assuming the real costs of a direct confrontation. While Ukrainians die, Europeans debate the next aid package in their climate-controlled parliaments, carefully calculating how much they can give without truly compromising their own security.
The arrival of a new US administration could mark the beginning of a new phase in this conflict. If there is the political will to recognize legitimate Russian security concerns—just as Kennedy implicitly acknowledged that the United States would not tolerate Soviet missiles in Cuba—then a negotiated solution is possible.
But any real solution must start from a fundamental premise: just as the United States would not have tolerated Soviet missiles in Mexico or Canada, Russia will not tolerate Western missiles in Ukraine. This is not a capricious or imperialist position; it is an existential one.
Europe, meanwhile, will have to decide whether it wants to remain a geopolitical appendage of Washington or whether it will finally regain the ability to think in terms of its own interests. Because from Moscow, the European spectacle doesn't inspire respect; it inspires pity.
The tragedy of this conflict lies not in the malice of its main actors, but in the inevitability of its logic. When the great powers feel their survival threatened, when they perceive that their vital space is being systematically reduced, they react as they have always reacted throughout history: with force.
The question that remains is whether the international community will be able to learn from the Cuban missile crisis: that lasting peace is only possible when all parties recognize and respect each other's fundamental security concerns. That stability is not built on humiliating the adversary, but on mutual recognition of geopolitical realities.
From the Kremlin's perspective, this war isn't about expansion or imperial glory. It's about survival. And history teaches us that there is no force more powerful, nor more dangerous, than a great nation fighting for its survival.
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