It was the 1er January 1995. For weeks, Moscow had been flexing its muscles and threatening to take the capital of Chechnya, Grozny. The government had finally launched the offensive. To everyone’s surprise, the Chechen resistance had halted the advance of the troops. That morning, the carcasses of tanks smoked like the bodies of dozens of charred, sacrificed young conscripts. The smell will stay in my throat for a long time.
Humiliation had not stopped the Russian army. On the contrary, she had replied like a thunder of rage. For months, it had vomited its bombs and its arsenal to put down the resistance, killing, in the process, tens of thousands of civilians and pulverizing the capital and the neighboring villages. Legacy of the Soviet Empire, the Russian army has made terror against populations its trademark.
When I watch the battles of Kharkiv, Mariupol or Kiev, I see the wild countryside of Chechnya again.
Among these troubled post-Soviet moments, I was also present when Ukraine gained independence in 1991. Euphoric moments, those, and great pride, which united tens of thousands of people, a human tide that overflowed from the Maidan into the heart of the capital. For Putin, this independence is a historical error, Ukraine is not a nation, and democracy is a Western disease. Like Grozny, Kiev must serve Greater Russia. However, here, the bet is huge. It has dimensions of a great war, a “civilizational conflict”. The autonomous region had only two million inhabitants in a territory equivalent to greater Montreal and the Eastern Townships combined. Ukraine is the largest country in Europe and had, until last week, 44 million inhabitants. The Ukrainian army also has 200,000 well-trained soldiers and a determined resistance.
Disaster
Unlike Chechnya, the West will supply Ukraine. NATO countries, including Canada, will send her weapons so she can hold out. And there will be those economic sanctions that will weaken the Russian economy and upset its oligarchs.
The Russian army will continue to advance, adding waves of conscripts and cannon fodder. Putin is playing his all… It is on the whole paranoid philosophy of a nationalism on steroids, since the fall of the USSR, that a propaganda is based which now risks collapsing.
If he loses here, it’s the beginning of the end. The opposition watches, feverishly. So, in Ukraine, he will have to put the package. Which means that this war will get bogged down, that the terror will intensify. And if he wins, how will Russia, this “colossus with feet of clay”, be able to subjugate this immense country in the long term?
The looming humanitarian disaster already resembles the Second World War: nearly a million refugees in Poland and neighboring countries after less than a week of offensive. These Eastern European countries will have to manage the exodus of this unspeakable tragedy.
There will come a time when Canada will have to do its part and take in some of these refugees. Let’s hope that Quebec will be more generous towards the Ukrainians than it has been towards the Afghans; he only accepted 89 of them out of thousands scattered across the rest of the country. There are approximately 40,000 Quebecers of Ukrainian origin who live in Quebec. They gave us back a hundredfold. As it did for Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, the Quebec government must show leadership and ask Ottawa to speed up the family reunification procedure.
We must also ask Ottawa to lighten the visa procedure so that Ukrainians can find some respite here, by allowing them to benefit from a simple entry procedure, as is the case for citizens of Mexico. and several European countries. It will be a contribution to Europe to heal the wounds of this imperialist delirium signed Vladimir Putin.