The proliferation of comments, opinions and opinions concerning the violent military aggression of Russia against its neighbor Ukraine, three times less populated and nearly thirty times less extensive, appears stunning! Nevertheless, we are still trying to understand why President Putin is waging this war and why he is attracting so much attention.
No doubt it is because he makes it personal and seems to hold the key to its outcome, as a great admirer and self-proclaimed successor of Stalin, who can be considered the greatest killer of the story. But still ?
Part of the answers lie in this modern dictator’s analysis of the very history of Ukraine and its relationship with Greater Russia. He thus affirms that the first is an integral part of the second and that it therefore has no right to dissociate itself from it! Which seems absurd, especially to the Ukrainians, those who suffered so much from first Stalinist exactions, at the very beginning of the 1930s, then, in 1941, Nazis, and again Stalinists! All of which explains at least partially their very courageous resistance and the rage of destruction with which Putin responds to them.
As mentioned on March 6, on the airwaves of France 24, Gérard Chaliand, author in particular of Why do we lose the war? (2016), in this case Putin’s arguments are not incomprehensible, without convincing. Indeed, he was not entirely wrong in asserting that, by leaving open the question of Ukraine’s integration into NATO, the main European powers and even more so the United States are threatening the security of Russia, already undermined by the disintegration of the USSR, which began in 1991.
Apart from the fact that these powers ruled out Ukraine’s membership of NATO even before the Russian invasion, such a pretext in no way justifies waging a war of aggression from another age, particularly deadly, by a resorted to massive bombardments which likely target and kill many more Ukrainian civilians than reported by the news media so far.
Warrior, geographer and tactician
The way in which Vladimir Putin goes about it, as generalissimo of the Russian armed forces, seems, on the one hand, to testify to a knowledge of the field that one would be tempted to qualify as Napoleonic and, on the other hand , draw inspiration from tactics already advocated by Clausewitz (Of the war1831) and possibly even more by Sun Tzu (The art of WarVIand century BC).
Thus, the increasingly successful attempts to completely block Ukrainian access to the Black Sea as well as the slow and cautious, but increasingly threatening and murderous encirclement of the capital, Kiev, appear logical from the point of view of geographical and tactical view. Above all, as Sun Tzu already advocated and as Hitler practiced, Putin resorts to propaganda and disinformation, as well as deception, suggesting that the Russian forces are getting bogged down irreparably. It does not care about international conventions on war and relies, as it did in Chechnya and Syria, on the policy of scorched earth and that of terror, primarily against the Ukrainian populations. , then with the threat of extending them to the planet afterwards!
Is Putin also a good strategist? Are the tactics of this dictator part of a real strategy likely to succeed? And what can the latter constitute? For Putin, do vengeance and cruelty take the place of determining objectives, to which all his actions on the ground would subscribe, including the total disregard for human life; first that of the Ukrainians, scapegoats for Europeans and North Americans, but also that of his own compatriots? Or is he playing double or quits, as Chaliand suggests?
In short, would Putin be both a bad politician and a bad strategist, to the point of wanting to “embrace” too much by destroying Ukraine and massacring its population, while mortgaging the future of his own country as well as that of together of humanity and the planet? Would it then be naïve to think that in this nuclear age, and unless Vladimir Putin is considered mad, which would moreover be a mistake, the necessary negotiations that must be conducted with him must also remind him in a convincing way of a double and terrible threat?
His strategy, if he really has one, is irremediably doomed to failure, in addition to being suicidal. In short, by overestimating the state of preparation of its armed forces and by underestimating the resistance capacity of the Ukrainians and the economic response of the Europeans and North Americans, it has indeed shown itself to be a bad strategist!