"(About the 2025 Russia-US summit) Zelensky's absence from a summit focused on the Ukrainian crisis is another point in favour of the Kremlin leader. In the new world order, only emperors have the authority, expertise and therefore the authorisation to untangle the world's knots, even if they have created them with their own hands and even if they concern the sovereignty of others. Zelensky's empty chair is a historic and political humiliation for Ukraine, but above all it confirms that the new imperial logic determines imperialist choices, elevating emperors to the role of plenipotentiaries of the world and reducing all others to the rank of subjects and vassals. The same treatment reserved for Zelensky excluded the European Union and the leaders of the main countries of our continent from the discussion with Putin. Indeed, for the first time, an American president spoke of us as an anomalous category, a survivor of history, still grappling with the ideologies of democracy and law: “the Europeans”, a world apart from that joint identity in the West that made Europe and America a community of destiny under the banner (often betrayed, yet always reaffirmed) of freedom and rights."