Vladimir Poutine wants to make the United States suffer and will not stop there. The Russian president has amply demonstrated his trickery on the Syrian issue. Between diplomatic maneuverings and military escalation, we understand that, applying his method to Ukraine, he does not shy away from his pleasure of playing, at the gates of Europe, with the nerves of our Western democracies trapped by their divisions and their divergent interests.
The history of the world is a string of badly healed wars, badly made peaces. When it comes to “painting” the United States, in the words of American Russologist Fiona Hill, Mr. Putin is seeking to make amends for the arrogance with which it has treated Russia in the 1990s, when they should have made the effort to make room for it in Europe. The “Putin phenomenon” is a product of this arrogance.
Putin considers not without reason, according to the Russologist, that the United States is today an “empire” on the defensive, in a mess similar to that in which Russia found itself when the USSR collapsed – seriously weakened to inside as well as outside. And he intends to take advantage of this, through patient tactical harassment – and also strong, from a convergence of interests with China. With the result, which is worrying to say the least, that the illiberalism on which Putin has built his authoritarian presidency for twenty years is the one that strikes American democracy today.
To his resentment, Putin borders on his mythologizing of the former USSR, on which he still manages to base his legitimacy so as, among other things, to make Russian citizens forget the state of disrepair of their national economy. If Moscow is working to reform a “Soviet” space, out of nostalgia and ferocious denial of democratic demands (at home, in Kazakhstan, in Belarus, in Ukraine, etc.), the fact remains that in reality, the experts point out, the Federation of Russia does not have the economic, military and political resources that the USSR had. It is pure bluster on the part of the Kremlin, as it recently threatened to do, to float the idea of sending missiles to Cuba and Venezuela.
Heard that the Russian army will not march on Kiev. If there is a military operation, it would logically be limited – to Donbass, essentially. And Moscow will probably wait, before rushing, until the Olympic Games which begin next week in Beijing have taken place, so as not to steal the show from friend Xi Jinping. If indeed the intentions of Putin, who cultivates vagueness, are decipherable.
Not sure, in any case, that Putin wants to get there, since he imposes it by his only military pressure on the Ukrainian border – and that he has other tools of nuisance. He is well aware that his demands – a treaty guaranteeing the non-enlargement of NATO and a retreat de facto of the Eastern European Alliance — are maximalist, especially since they amount to Moscow wanting to reconstitute its former “zone of influence”. For the time being, he has already scored points for having captured all the attention of the White House and European capitals. In a way, he bursts an abscess.
Notwithstanding Moscow’s unacceptable way, there is reason to open the discussion around a reform of the “security architecture” in Europe. This architecture needs to be modernized. In this, Moscow in a way joins the French President, Emmanuel Macron, who had cringed in 2019 by speaking of the “brain death” of NATO and by calling for a “ reset » relations with Moscow. It is in this context, moreover, that Macron and Putin will speak on the telephone on Friday. One can only hope that a hope of de-escalation filters through this conversation.
Another (very) fragile hope of diplomatic progress: the delivery, on Wednesday, to the Russian side of Washington’s “written responses”, which have not been made public, to Moscow’s claims. Putin will certainly react coldly to the refusal of the United States to block Ukraine’s access to NATO – access which, in effect, is postponed indefinitely. The responses nevertheless offer a “diplomatic route”, notably through formal negotiations on “arms control” in Europe. Nothing very new, to be honest. But these are answers that have the advantage of setting things straight: the European security system is perhaps negotiable, the democratic freedoms on which Ukrainian society is building are not.