Vladimir Putin’s “war cabinet” intersects with the coterie of strongmen who hold power in Russia. They are in fact only a handful: Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Security Council of Russia; Alexandre Bortnikov, director of the FSB (ex-KGB); Sergei Naryshkin, director of foreign intelligence; and Sergei Shoigu, Minister of Defence. Soon to be in their 70s, like the president, who turns 70 next October, they have a lot in common, starting with a siege mentality and an obsession with control, inside and out. Four of these five men went through the KGB. As Alexander Gabuev writes in The Economistthe collapse of the USSR, which Putin has already said considers the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the XXand century, was the highlight of their adult life. They will obviously never come back.
However, the influence of these siloviki (strongmen) has grown steadily since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, with sanctions not only strengthening their anti-Western sentiments but also their grip on the levers of the national economy. Faced with this radicalization, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, whom the Kremlin continues to put forward as the voice of a possible diplomatic solution, has inevitably seen his influence diminish in the circles of power. A dynamic that is reminiscent of that which prevails in Tehran between hardliners and moderates, at a time when attempts are being made to restore the 2015 international agreement on Iranian nuclear power. In a way, the Putin clique is also the mirror of the American neoconservatives, who, from Dick Cheney to Donald Rumsfeld, under George W. Bush provoked the outbreak of the war against Iraq.
On Monday evening, Mr. Putin gave an incredibly emotional and resentful speech, just like the clan of these warmongers, made up of men convinced that Western democracies under American leadership are in crisis and that we must take advantage of it, including understood by weapons. When hearing Putin recognize the independence of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and announce the entry of armored vehicles into the Donbass on the fallacious pretext of a “genocide”, we say to ourselves that the idea that the Russian army is rushing to Kiev has become more plausible.
It was also, on the part of the president, a political speech strongly marked by backwardness. By saying that Ukraine is a fiction created by Bolshevik Russia, that it is an “inalienable part of [leur] history of [leur] culture, of [leur] spiritual space”, asserting that it was part of “the lands of historic Russia […] before the XVIIand century”, he presented the project of a Russia which, by trying piecemeal to reconstitute its empire, seeks less to live in the 21and century than to look back on the past.
It is also striking to note, now that Putin announces the sending of tanks to the Donbass, to what extent Moscow’s strategy in Ukraine is a copy and paste of what happened in 2008 in Georgia. At the end of a Russian military intervention in Abkhazia and South Ossetia against the Georgian army, Putin had recognized the independence of these two small separatist regions. Again, the Russian intervention had been launched under the pretext that Tbilisi was carrying out a “genocide” against the Russian populations of these territories. And again, Georgia’s desire to join NATO was the underlying reason for the Russian operation. Have Europe and the United States really taken the measure of this precedent? The diplomatic efforts made in recent weeks by the French President, Emmanuel Macron, to find a way out of the crisis appear, in any case, only more vain.
What will the sanctions change? Three of Putin’s war cabinet members and several members of his inner circle are already blacklisted by the US Treasury. Sanctions applied since 2014 have not slowed the growth of the Russian military and massive cyberattacks, nor domestic repression of the opposition, political assassinations and human rights abuses. Without being perfectly armoured, the Kremlin prepared to suffer an economic siege. We know that it is sitting on large reserves of dollars and that the rise in the price of hydrocarbons benefits it.
Berlin made a difficult gesture by suspending the certification procedure for the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline on Tuesday as part of a first set of sanctions decreed by the United States and Europe. A fine example of the difficulty of ensuring that reprisals penalize Russia more than the Europeans. The problem has not ceased to arise. Committing to tougher sanctions if Moscow continues the military escalation, will the West go through with its threats? Nothing is less certain, which exposes the Ukrainians on the alert to all the uncertainties.