"Battleship Potëmkin.

Closing this issue 13 (but isn't 13 supposed to bring good luck?) of Elettronica AV, came the news of the invasion of Ukraine by some 190,000 Russian soldiers.

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Editorial

by Fritz Walter | And I thought I had seen it all in the last 20 years: a tsunami at Christmas 2004; the great global economic recession between 2007 and 2013; two popes at the same time from 2013; a global pandemic with lockdowns, masks, green passes and quarantines. What could be missing from this catastrophic collection of nefarious events? A nice world war!

And here I am served. And here we are served. In closing this number 13 (but isn't 13 supposed to bring good luck?) of Elettronica AV, came the news of the invasion of Ukraine by some 190,000 Russian soldiers. A war made and ended less than 900 kilometers away. A war between two neighboring nations that had disliked each other for too many years. True, some might object that there had also been a war in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, but while that was a dramatic page of the twentieth century, that one was more framed as a civil war, or as a series of secessionist conflicts over the ashes of the nation ruled for nearly three decades by Marshal Tito.

I do not want to, and above all I do not have to, go into the reasons that led to this conflict. The reasons of Putin's Russia, which is asking for the famous "buffer"; the Ukraine, which in defiance of any previous international agreement, is demanding its freedom to request access to the European Union first and the NATO then; this by virtue of that 'open door principle' contained in Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949 and for over 70 years reiterated on several occasions by the International Organisation for Defence Cooperation.

And as they say, "between the two sides..." third parties intervene! Europe intervenes with both economic and military aid to the Ukrainians; the global economic community (European Union, United States, Canada and Great Britain) intervenes with the paralysis of the financial system of Putin's Russia and all the oligarchs scattered around the world, trying to take away oxygen from the ability to finance a war machine composed of 300 thousand soldiers. President Biden's United States of America intervened, certainly with words, but if they do not have a war on their hands, they are not happy. The result is there for all to see: for the Ukrainians and Russians, thousands of civilian and military deaths; for Europe, two million refugees to take in; for everyone, the effects on energy prices and raw materials such as wheat and other foodstuffs. For electronics, major effects on raw material markets, which will only worsen the 'chip crunch' that has blocked and is blocking world industry.

Practically one hundred years have passed since the first showing of the five-act film "The Battleship Potëmkin", but the final meaning is perhaps what we all hope for today: the symbol of an inevitable change that can no longer wait to be realised. Also because, as Italy's most famous accountant would say: this war is "a crazy shit!".


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