The idea of an “existential” war between East and West, waged by Moscow on the ridgeline that is Ukraine in 2022, is fundamental to understanding what motivates Vladimir Putin and those who support.
For Putin, Ukraine is not just a story of military alliances, Western expansion, American threat and demonized NATO. That’s strategy, geopolitics: important… but there’s something else.
Ukraine is also the red line, a key line of defense of Russian tradition, of a certain conception of civilization, against the invasion by capitalist and Western “decadence”.
Take the words of those who inspire Vladimir Putin. For example, Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, politically close to power, carefully “cultivated” by Putin for a decade – in what looks like a new “alliance of the sword and the brush”, version XXIand century.
Shortly after the outbreak of the invasion on February 24, Kirill said:
“It is something that goes beyond political convictions. We are in a war in the metaphysical sense. Gay parades in the West show that sin is a constant in human behavior. This war is against those who support gays, against the western world which has tried to destroy the Donbass because the Donbass resists, opposes a fundamental rejection to the so-called values proposed by the Empire, by the holders of world power. (quoted on March 13 by the Corriere della Sera).
The alignment of the Russian Orthodox Church behind Putin’s bombardment targeting “evil”—which here includes the women and children of Mariupol and Kharkiv, killed by the thousands—has had happy but rare exceptions.
For example, the Ukrainian press reports that on March 6, in the Kostroma region, 300 km northeast of Moscow, the parish priest of the village church of Karabanovo concluded his sermon by proclaiming “No to war! and quoting the command “Thou shalt not kill.”
Two hours later, the police knocked on his door. In the middle of the week, a local court fined him and warned him that any further offense would land him in prison. For quoting the Old Testament, so dear to Patriarch Kirill…
Among Putin’s inspirations – a man who reads, listens and had his political, ideological, spiritual influences – is also Ivan Iline, a traditionalist Russian philosopher, who died in exile in the 1950s after being proscribed by the Soviet regime.
According to Michel Eltchaninoff, author of Inside the mind of Vladimir Putin (Babel, 2016), Iline is one of the mentors of the Russian president in his nostalgic, reactionary ideology, and in his effort to rebuild Russian greatness.
Iline had written for example: “By State, we mean an organic community led by a paternal monarch. “Completely in line with Putin’s conceptions… even if some will prefer to replace “paternal monarch” with “big mafia boss”.
This “existential” confrontation… is it also in the eyes of Westerners, or of those who represent the West?
Tricky question. Because to the assertion of the patriarch Kirill (and undoubtedly of the crusader Putin as well) for whom “the West is the Empire of Evil”… can we answer: “Russia is the Empire of Evil”?
To the question thus formulated, the answer is obviously “no”, and we must denounce the inappropriate attacks against Russian symbols and personalities, particularly in the cultural milieu, as we have seen for two weeks.
To cancel a young Russian pianist at the OSM, who has nothing to do with the regime, or to change a concert program in which Tchaikovsky had been entered, is to fall into a crude trap.
Russian culture is an extraordinary continent, in music, in literature, in cinema, in architecture… “Russia is more than a country, it is a civilization”, said Stephen Kotkin, great American specialist of Stalin, little suspect of complacency towards the Putin system, when he was interviewed by the magazine The New Yorker (article posted on March 11).
And if the current president, with his annealed frustration and his desire for conquest, unfortunately represents something authentic, heavy and recurring in Russian political history, Russia is not just about Vladimir Putin.
But that does not exhaust the question which, reformulated in a broader way, can become: “Is the war in Ukraine a conflict of values? So there, the obvious answer is “yes”.
Ukraine is another Russia, or is no longer Russia today, even if it comes from a distant common mould. And what she is defending today against traditional Russian imperialism, which is destructive and anti-modern, are yes, Western values which have “taken over” in Kiev… whereas they remain inadmissible in Moscow.
Freedom of thought, expression, political pluralism; cultural, religious, sexual freedom. All things that remain unbearable for the Russian saber and brush, unleashed today.
François Brousseau is an international affairs columnist at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]