The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine is not only a geopolitical conflict between two distinct states, it is also a generational confrontation between two statesmen, two diametrically opposed worldviews.
The two presidents belong, each, to two different worlds: Vladimir Putin belongs to the past, the world of yesterday, that of the short XXand past century. Volodymyr Zelensky, for his part, rather embodies the present moment, the world of the XXIand expected century, yet to be born from the Atlantic to the Urals.
In two months of war, President Vladimir Putin has completely squandered the political capital he had accumulated in almost 20 years as head of the Russian state. Once a statesman respected for these political and economic achievements, he is now a war criminal, according to US President Joe Biden, a view now shared by the majority of democratic countries.
As for President Volodymyr Zelensky, a former actor before becoming the President of Ukraine at war, he is now acclaimed by 90% of the Ukrainian population and by an overwhelming majority of liberal democracies who recognize in him a charismatic warlord and a popular national hero, true servant of his people, already larger than life.
The perceptible generational divide between Putin and Zelensky is also present within Russia itself, between Putin’s supporters and his detractors. This is also why, immediately after the outbreak of hostilities, tens of thousands of young people left Russia for neighboring countries where visas were not required: Turkey, Georgia, Armenia…
The last homo sovieticus
Putin, now 69, is thus the latest systemic avatar of thehomo sovieticus. As such, it was formed, politically and ideologically, by the most totalitarian of the institutions of the Soviet state, the famous Committee for State Security (KGB, in Russian), the central element within the multiple services intelligence of the Soviet Union.
In post in Dresden, in East Germany, between 1985 and 1990, Putin was then successively the paradoxical witness of the power of the USSR and its preponderant impact in international relations, especially in the context of the American Cold War. -Soviet, then the unprecedented reduction of this unique geopolitical, military and civilizational influence after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the implosion of the USSR in 1991. This reversal of fortune, without common measure for the greatness and the imperial inclinations of traditional Russia, was to mark Putin in a lasting and traumatic way.
Putin’s political-ideological convictions, internalized during his service in the KGB, adherence to Marxism-Leninism, corresponded to those of the Soviet political elites of that time. These were coupled with the use of brute force without qualms or excessive scruples embodied by the army and the police, seen as an effective instrument of government.
Once elected President of Russia in 2000, Putin’s ideological frame of reference shifted even more visibly and explicitly. Marxism-Leninism then turned into Great Russian ethnic nationalism, based on traditional Orthodox religion and the rehabilitation of the Stalinist past glorified by the victory of the USSR against Nazi Germany at the end of the Second World War.
In our view, this is its breadcrumb trail; it explains and justifies, even today, its final political objective, that is to say the recreation of imperial Russia, of which the Ukraine would constitute only a subject and vassalized part in the living space of the new tsar Russian.
The free electron
Conversely, Zelensky is a free spirit who emerged from civil society after the independence of Ukraine in 1991. Zelensky was born in 1978. At the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Zelensky was 13 years old. His political and ideological beliefs were shaped not by the institutions of the Soviet state, but by a Ukrainian state that was gradually built on the premises of political pluralism and an emerging liberal democracy.
Following the Maidan Revolution (2014), Ukraine’s political shift meant that the country now turned its gaze to the European Union and the politico-military umbrella of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
A comic actor, Zelensky then launched into audiovisual production. His production company, Kvartal 95, produced the television series servant of the people, in which he played the role of the Ukrainian president. This series aired from 2015 to 2019 and was immensely popular with Ukrainian audiences. Taking advantage of the success achieved, employees of Kvartal 95 created a political party with the same name in March 2018.
On the evening of December 31, 2018, on the sidelines of the New Year’s speech by Petro Poroshenko, incumbent President of Ukraine, Zelensky announced his candidacy for the presidential election of 2019. After his actual election victory, Zelensky will become the true servant of all freedom-loving citizens of Ukraine.
The right to exist
Ultimately, the new Euro-Atlantic orientation of democratic Ukraine was and will never be accepted by Putin. This geopolitical demand from Putin’s Russia is similar, if not identical, to that of Soviet leaders such as Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, who intervened militarily in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 respectively.
In the mind of today’s Russian autocrat, Ukraine belongs to the Russian sphere of influence and must remain there at all costs; Ukraine does not even have the right to exist. This is counting without the courage and fierce will to resist of the Ukrainians, admirably embodied by their young president Volodymyr Zelensky.