The world is definitely going backwards. The rattling of weapons in the Sino-Taiwan Strait in the South China Sea is a geopolitical game, which if the Rubicon is crossed, there will be no winners and we will all be losers. Against the background of the Russian military aggression against the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine, many world analysts do not rule out the possibility of a Chinese military invasion of the island of Taiwan, as a "rectification of the historical mistake" and the (re)unification of Taiwan with mainland China.

Visiting after a quarter of a century by the high American state official Nancy Pelosi does not contribute to stabilization, on the contrary, it only increases the tension in this part of the world. No one wishes for the worst-case scenario, which is a direct Sino-US military conflict over and around the island of Taiwan. However, we cannot be sure and completely reject this variant, which would also mean the introduction of some kind of World War III, despite the fact that it will not be nominally named as such.

Can we draw parallels from the Russian military aggression against Ukraine and the possible such Chinese one against Taiwan, that is, can the "Ukraine" case be compared to the one in Taiwan?

The world is paying dearly for the mistake with Ukraine!

In his nightly address to the nation, the commander-in-chief of the Russian armed forces and the most powerful Russian man for decades, President Putin, declared his "special military operation" in the southwestern neighbor by saying that in the concept of Ukraine and Ukrainians, as a people and a nation in the Russian social, political, historical and cultural-linguistic milieu, they are a "historical and national" integral part of the Russian world, that is, of the wider Russian cultural matrix.

The thesis of V.V. Putin that "Ukraine is an artificial creation, a nation created in 1917 by the decision of the Soviet leader V.I. Lenin" only brought to the surface the Russian complex and the frustration from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and before that of the Russian Empire, because huge territories with different peoples and nations "separated", i.e. freed themselves from the monarchist hegemony of the Russians. And they became independent states, members of the UN, some of the EU and NATO, the geopolitical arch-enemies of the Russian Federation.

In fact, an even greater complex for the Russian nation and the Russian state leadership is that millions of Russians after 1991 live on the other side of the borders of the Russian Federation, in its larger and smaller neighbors, which for Putin's worldview is an "injustice" which, well, he he started to straighten her. It is no coincidence that former Russian President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev publicly said that "all of Georgia" is Russia's legitimate next target. And, in the end, the ridiculous justification for denazification of the "Kyiv regime" will be reduced to an attempt to conquer more and more territories, cities and villages in the southeast of Ukraine and their formal-legal and institutional annexation to the Russian Federation.

Fortunately for the truth-loving and freedom-loving people, the incredible fighting spirit, courage and sacrifice of the Ukrainian army, but also of the entire Ukrainian nation, these sinister and terrible plans of the Siberian beast have now been thwarted.

Taiwan is something else!

And if today we undoubtedly have a separate Ukrainian nation, with its own codified and standardized separate Ukrainian language, different from Russian, and the state of Ukraine, which is territorially the largest on the European continent, a full member of the UN, the case with Taiwan is somewhat different. That is, drastically different.

Of the Taiwanese "billion on Cile", not to mention the cosmic stupidity of one of our most promising politicians in the nineties, Vasil Tupurkovski, the island of Taiwan is internationally recognized by ten, in international politics irrelevant ie. small states, which cannot, with their decision to unilaterally recognize Taiwan as an independent state, resolve its status and make it an internationally legally recognized member state of the UN.

Here, naturally, China stands in the way, as a permanent member of the Security Council with the right of veto. Taiwan, in fact, is "something" other than China's huge state, when the losers of the Chinese civil war after the Second World War retreated to this island and created a democratic system of governance and management, the antipode of the totalitarian communist dictatorship of Mao Zedong. As ideological arch-enemies of communism, the Americans take this island under "their control" and from it over the following decades create perhaps one of their most important allies and a strategically extremely important factor in this part of the world in the wider Indo-Pacific region.

The complexes and frustrations of the Chinese state leadership are that it is an island inhabited by Chinese people (there is no Taiwanese nation), forcibly separated from the territorial integrity of China. The big problem for Xi Jinping is that these Chinese are a little "different" from the ones he was taught, i.e. they are freedom-loving and democratically educated and emancipated citizens for almost eight decades, who will not trade their freedom even at the cost of their lives. about China's totalitarian regime and way of life presented as an "economic miracle".

And in reality, the miracle is Taiwan. On this small island, slightly larger than Macedonia, 1/5 of the microchips for the most advanced technological industry are produced. Probably the Chinese have not yet dared to "liberate" their little brother, because it would mean economic collapse for China and a potential social and economic implosion in the country of billions by the Chinese middle class who have been taught a Western lifestyle and the comforts that he provides them.

After the huge crime that Putin did and continues to do in Ukraine, no one in the world, at least from normal people and politicians, does not want or cheer for China's "special military operation" in Taiwan. Whatever excuses you make for it. Because at the end of the day, the biggest collateral victims will be innocent Ukrainian and Taiwanese citizens, first of all women and children, but also old and young and everyone else, down to one. Because of the unscrupulousness and madness of the big ones, who, for their higher geopolitical goal, are ready to throw hundreds of thousands and even millions of innocent civilians into war and into death without blinking an eye.

(The author is a political scientist)