Unsurprisingly, but with virulence.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech to the nation on Tuesday was reminiscent of the Cold War era, with its openly anti-Western overtones and, above all, the Kremlin strongman’s announcement to suspend the participation of Russia to the New Start agreement on nuclear disarmament. This is the last bilateral agreement between Washington and Moscow to counter the proliferation of this type of weapon. Its suspension comes to crystallize an increasingly frank rupture between Russia and the United States, almost a year after the beginning of the Russian invasion in Ukraine.
But if appearances can evoke the past and its confrontation between two blocs, that of East and West, Vladimir Putin’s address to his people (and to the rest of the world) above all came to confirm the nationalist project on Tuesday. that the Russian autocrat has led on the back of Ukraine for years – just like the “weak power” of his country on the current international chessboard, to use the words of the Russian researcher Fyodor Lukyanov.
And this, rather than the beginning of a new cold war, as several analysts like to assert since the beginning of Russian aggression in Ukraine.
“Talking about another Cold War is an abuse of language,” says historian Richard Carrier, who teaches at the Royal Military College of Canada. “The bipolar world of that time stopped in 1991 [avec l’éclatement de l’Union soviétique]. We have since entered a multipolar world where the ideological confrontation between two blocs has well and truly disappeared and where value systems are now heterogeneous. »
Employed for the first time by George Orwell in 1947 to describe the indirect confrontation between the USSR and the United States, the term “cold war” captures the symbolic combat – and sometimes military, in several countries of the globe – which has opposed for more than 50 years communism and liberalism.
A symbol and words
On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden sought to keep this symbolic primacy alive by describing from Warsaw, Poland, hours after Vladimir Putin’s speech, US engagement in NATO and Ukraine as the struggle of the free world against authoritarianism. “Our support for Ukraine will not waver, NATO will not be divided and we will not tire. President Putin’s cowardly thirst for territorial expansion and power will fail,” he said.
Russian propaganda also seeks to keep alive the idea of this duality, by posing the war of invasion of Ukraine launched by the Kremlin as an act of resistance against a “Western elite” which would seek to make Russia disappear. Tuesday, from Moscow, the Russian president also affirmed without flinching that he was not fighting “the Ukrainian people”, but rather the “Western masters” of Kiev who would have taken him hostage, and this, by “effectively occupying the country “.
By also summoning the mythology of the Cold War, the Kremlin aims to regain, “in appearance rather than in fact”, “the podium of the masters of the world from which it collapsed in the early 1990s”, summarized in 2018 the researcher Sophie Momzikoff in the pages of the National Defense Review. According to her, Russia, which “is no longer anything more than a regional power whose mission is not to change the world”, is thus seeking to validate in public opinion the persistence of the sphere of influence that it would have inherited from the USSR. Even if, in the end, Vladimir Putin’s speech repeated only for the umpteenth time his nationalist and populist speech articulated at the beginning of this war.
“Since 1999, it is very difficult to say what is going on in the head of Vladimir Poutine, summarizes Richard Carrier, but we are, with him, faced with a rustic and even quite banal Russian nationalism. Yes, he is being belligerent and provocative in claiming that the West is putting the world on the brink of a bigger conflict by supporting Ukraine. But it is not clear that with these words, repeated on Tuesday, he will convince the rest of the world of the prospect of a Third World War. »
It is that far from being the dominant empire of a bloc seeking to impose its ideology within the framework of a “new cold war”, Russia is today above all “almost alone”, he says, and this, in a world where the balance of power is now played by three, between Russia, the United States and China.
A loneliness which has just been maintained by the announcement of Moscow’s withdrawal from the New Start treaty. ” [Les Occidentaux] want to inflict a strategic defeat on us; [ils] are attacking our nuclear sites”, justified the strong man of the Kremlin, while clearly indicating that he is not completely withdrawing from this treaty which expires in 2026.
American diplomacy had already indicated in January that Russia no longer complied with the letter and the spirit of the text. Last August, Moscow announced that it was suspending planned inspections of its military sites by Americans. Russian inspections in the United States were halted during the pandemic and have never resumed since.
Necessary diplomacy
From Athens, Greece, where he was visiting, the head of the American diplomacy, Antony Blinken, described as “very disappointing and irresponsible” the decision of Russia and indicated that the United States was watching carefully what Moscow was going to do. “actually” do.
“But, of course, we remain ready to discuss strategic arms limitation with Russia at any time, regardless of anything happening in the world or in our relationship,” he added. .
An openness to dialogue and diplomacy which, however, gives very little hope of seeing the beginning of the end of the war of invasion which began a year ago — and which, without being placed at the heart of a new cold war, nevertheless remains dangerous for the entire globe, believes Mr. Carrier.
“The only possible end is through a compromise that is difficult to envisage because of current propaganda and positions. Both sides,” he said. “And in this context, diplomacy is not to be neglected, since it is its absence that feeds exaggerated speeches”, with acerbic rhetoric, like that of an hour and 45 minutes that Vladimir Putin brought in on Tuesday in history.