From the funeral in Moscow of the “martyr” Daria Douguina (“She is our Joan of Arc”, according to a Russian chronicler) to the “museum” of demolished Russian tanks which are exposed, out of bravado, in the city center of kyiv, we sees Russia, like the United States and Ukraine, objectively locked into a common logic, six months after the start of the conflict — that of a war that is allowed to drag on.
Six months after the crushing failure of the blitzkrieg strategy attempted by Vladimir Putin, a dynamic of stagnation, of war of attrition, with no diplomatic prospects for ending the crisis. The positions on both sides remain maximalist: the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, never ceases to say that the Ukrainian territories (Crimea and Donbass) are not negotiable. He repeated it again, last week, to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is trying to pose as a mediator, against a backdrop of UN paralysis. The Ukrainians would view any concession, understandably, as a surrender.
Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, would have opened the door to talks with Zelensky, the Turks claimed after the conversations that Erdoğan had in Sochi with the Russian president. However, there is no question for Putin to open negotiations before kyiv has definitively renounced the Crimea and the territories conquered and occupied since February by the Russians, ie around 20% of Ukraine. Especially since the assassination by car bomb of Daria Douguina throws oil on the fire in ultranationalist circles who cry revenge.
Some believed, or wanted to believe, that the recent agreement on the export of grain from Ukrainian Black Sea ports could potentially serve as a starting point for broader discussions. For the time being, it is a hope in the form of a view of the mind. To blow a little hot on a lot of cold from time to time, Putin would in fact only be buying time in a context where his military troops are out of breath and where the Ukrainians, newly armed with advanced Western technology, are now able to accurately hit targets in the Crimea.
It so happens that, militarily, autumn is approaching and that it is of course an unavoidable operational horizon. While Putin seeks to rebuild his military forces and launch a new ground offensive, the Ukrainians are still resisting the numerical superiority of Russian artillery. Exemplary resistance, it goes without saying, all the more remarkable that the Ukrainians are “celebrating” on this Wednesday their independence, proclaimed on August 24, 1991, but a resistance that everyone knows would not have lasted so long without the support in armaments provided by the West, first and foremost that of the United States. However, if this support is massive, we nevertheless know that it is not sufficient to significantly modify the balance of power. There is a risk that the conflict will be frozen, literally and figuratively, as after 2014. In which case, what winter would people expect? First for the Ukrainians, given the hold that Moscow has over a large part of the national economy? But also for ordinary Russians, on whom Western economic sanctions increasingly weigh?
Moreover, one cannot ignore the fact that the United States has an interest in dragging out the war for a while. It is obviously useful to them in terms of its military industry, but also in terms of energy (exports of gas) and agriculture (sales of wheat).
Daria Douguina was an ultra-nationalist totally won over, like her father Alexander, to the “special military operation” in Ukraine. To the point, moreover, of reproaching Putin for not doing enough against the West. Close to far-right European circles like Putin, Alexander Dougin, whom the attack apparently targeted rather than his daughter, undoubtedly exaggerated the proximity of his links with the Russian president. He is nonetheless an ideologue who, pleading for the re-establishment of an orthodox “Greater Russia” reigning over all Russian-speaking territories, surely inspired him.
Fact noted in a report of the New Yorker : it turns out that the Russian army disproportionately uses young men belonging to ethnic minorities from small economically disadvantaged republics, such as Dagestan, Chechnya and Bashkiria… Cannon fodder of political designs which serve, they are to Putin what African Americans were to the United States in Vietnam.