towards a third world war after the delivery of heavy weapons such as Leopard 2 tanks?

On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin launched his armies to attack Ukraine. The master of the Kremlin no doubt thought that, less than a week later, Volodymyr Zelensky would be on the run abroad, that the Russian flag would fly over kyiv and that the country would once again have become, as in the days of the USSR, a dependency of his empire. For their part, the Westerners were well decided not to let it happen, but they thought they would get away with it, certain that economic sanctions against the aggressor and financial aid to the attacked country would be enough to bring the Russian dictator back to reason and to compel him to withdraw his troops.

Nearly a year later, despite the bombardments and the hundreds of thousands of men launched against it, Ukraine is resisting valiantly, but at the cost of growing support from Westerners. Today, tanks, tomorrow, perhaps, combat planes.

By dint of increasing the degree of violence in this way, aren’t we risking the worst? Isn’t that how world wars start? Beware of such words: if the escalation is real, the rhetoric about the risk of World War III comes from Russian propaganda. So what does history tell us? From the dangers of alliances to those of the status quo, in this new episode of our series “Dis, Uncle Obs”, François Reynart retraces the outbreak of the two world wars to help us understand what is at stake today.