Can the support of Americans and Europeans for the Ukrainians at war against the Russian invader be maintained over time?
While the reinforcements sent free of charge to the victim of the aggression are expensive, do not necessarily always surrender, do they reduce (in certain cases) the existing stocks of the donor armies?
While the world economy is suffering the repercussions of this war in terms of inflation, shortages of food stocks, reorientation of energy flows to the detriment of coal and Russian oil (while waiting for gas)?
While Western public opinion, still on the whole sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause, becomes lukewarm over time, and this war, settling in for a long time, gradually leaves the world headlines and risks becoming an annoying “noise of bottom ” ?
It is in this context that we can place the last exchange, lively and even acrimonious, between the French president and the head of Ukrainian diplomacy. On Friday, Emmanuel Macron declared – for the second time since the start of the war – that “we must not humiliate Russia, so that, the day the fighting stops, we can build a way out through diplomatic channels “.
Saturday, dry response from Dmytro Kouleba, the Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs: “Calls to avoid humiliating Russia can only humiliate France or any other country. Because it is Russia that humbles itself. We’d all better focus on putting Russia back in its place. It will bring peace and save lives. »
According to the Ukrainians, such attention to the psyche and moods of Vladimir Putin – on the pretext that, huddled in the corner, without a way out to “save honor”, he could cause an even worse misfortune than any the destruction he has sown so far — are childish, playing the enemy’s game and yielding nothing.
According to them, Putin understands only the language of force and, until further notice, any idea of “sparing” it can only encourage the “Beast”.
The Donbass is still in the balance; the time for diplomacy has not come and the Ukrainians — whether this legitimate aspiration is realistic or not — still have the hope of regaining territory, or even completely driving the Russians out of their country.
They are 82%, according to a poll conducted in May by the International Institute of Sociology in kyiv – yes, in Ukraine at war, opinion polls are still being conducted – to say: “no concessions”; “territorial integrity”; “reconquest of the torn territory”.
This is not the “line” of the Americans or of NATO. Even less that of the Germans or the French. It is not even that of Volodymyr Zelensky, the great chief strategist. No, it is simply that of the Ukrainian people.
This line consists in saying: “We want to reconquer our country, our whole country. If we leave this conquered territory to Putin today with a speech of hatred and denial of our people, at the cost of our blood, of our soldiers killed, of women and children raped… This will only feed the Beast and encourage her to start again, as soon as she can. »
In other words: the fundamental impulse of Putin’s Russia, in 2022, is the absorption and annihilation of a Ukraine denied in its national existence. Consequently, the defeat of Russia, a real defeat – and without “delicacy” for the psyche of a humiliated tsar – is for them a requirement of security, in addition to being a moral imperative.
A bit like, in 1944 or 1945, the total defeat of Germany – and not a compromise with Hitler – was an objective on which it was impossible to compromise.
This intransigence of the Ukrainians may offend sensitive souls. It does not necessarily amount to posing the equation “Putin’s Russia equals Hitler’s Germany”… but it does reflect, at the very least, their total lack of illusions about the possibility of a compromise with their attacker.
A predator of which they know, better than anyone, to take the measure, when they say: “A Russian victory would be a nightmare as regards security… for you! »
We then understand the exasperation of a Dmytro Kouleba, when he hears brilliant minds, in Paris or in Washington, advising him to “gentle with Putin” or “to forget the Crimea and the Donbass”. He cannot bear such a colonial type discussion about his country, in which learned foreigners “who know” organize a distribution of Ukrainian territories.
Especially since, precisely on the ground, nothing is decided, between fragile Russian gains in Donbass, an astonishing Ukrainian counter-attack underway in Severodonetsk, and a possible “frozen war” with Russians who would entrench themselves on lands “conquered”, but emptied and destroyed.
A race against time is underway, where Westerners are beginning to wonder where the end of the tunnel is, to wonder about the price they themselves are prepared to pay… while the Ukrainians, engaged in a war existentialism that has been imposed on them, an anti-imperialist war for the independence of their nation, insist: “Now is not the time to let us down! »
François Brousseau is an international affairs columnist at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]