Imagine… Can you imagine your cities being bombed? The brief speech delivered to the Canadian Parliament from kyiv on Tuesday morning by President Volodymyr Zelensky was bound to be disturbing. We are not here in the flesh – in kyiv, Mariupol or Kharkiv – along with the tragedy that the Ukrainians are living through and the infamous violence committed by Putin against civilians, in the cynical bombardments of residential buildings , hospitals and schools, are reported to us live and therefore affect us as closely as possible.
In the unexpected role of the Western hero of democratic resistance, “Z” immediately benefits from the solidarity of public opinion in Canada and that, unanimous, of his political class, starting with that, intimate by his family origins , Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, Chrystia Freeland. Anti-Putin unanimity is all the greater because Canada is home to the largest Ukrainian diaspora in the world.
However, his exercise of international solidarity – the Ukrainian president was last week, by video, in front of the British Parliament and will deliver another speech, Wednesday, from kyiv in front of the American Congress – does not give the results he hopes. Or at least not yet. The Trudeau government announced, ahead of Zelensky’s speech, new sanctions against fifteen Russian officials and promised to improve its messy reception process for refugees, who are fleeing their country by the millions. The fact remains that the Ukrainian president continues to come up against a wall regarding his key request relating to the establishment by NATO of a no-fly zone in the skies of his country caught in a vice.
An end of inadmissibility which is understandable, of course, given the risks of escalation that the application of such a measure would induce in a context where Putin, moreover, sprinkles his speech with threats of nuclear attack. Since the Russian military aggression is on an unprecedented scale and brutality, and without wishing to lose oneself in disastrous conjectures, one cannot however completely exclude that NATO, which will meet in an extraordinary summit next week, will end up get there. The next two weeks will be crucial, say experts, as difficult Russian-Ukrainian “negotiations” continue on which Moscow is blowing hot and cold.
The “friend” Zelensky is an “inspiration” and a “champion of democracy”, said Justin Trudeau. Certainly. But how, with him, these words are empty! We have a Prime Minister who always gives the impression that he only does self-serving show politics. It was after all at his invitation that the Ukrainian President addressed the Parliament. What Mr. Zelensky’s calls for help reveal is, fundamentally, the powerlessness of Western chancelleries to curb Vladimir Putin’s headlong rush. The emotional solidarity expressed by our governments does not conceal the reality that the Ukrainians are, basically, left to their own devices.
Not that arms are not supplied in substantial quantities to the Ukrainian army and resistance fighters through the back door (which, by the way, is almost like saying that the West is de facto at war with Russia).
And not that Russia is not subject to an unprecedented set of sanctions. American – and Canadian – embargo on Russian gas and oil, exclusion from the SWIFT financial network, freezing of half of the central bank’s foreign exchange reserves, all-out haro on the oligarchs… Sanctions that are much more than blows claw, but which could, in the opinion of some, be much more biting with regard to the small kleptocratic clique on which the regime relies – and better targeted, so as to spare ordinary Russians.
Thomas Piketty’s blog raises crucial questions in this regard: this specialist in economic inequalities argues that the oligarchs that the West claims to sanction have multiple loopholes and that they basically only represent a fraction of the fortunes that you should aim. A giant step, he says, would be taken in the fight against oligarchs of all stripes if Western countries finally put in place an “international financial cadastre”, a kind of public register of who owns what and in which country. We are far from it, as this technically possible project would shed light on networks that Western fortunes prefer to keep opaque. Fortunes, one suspects, whose interests “are much more strongly linked to those of the Russian and Chinese oligarchs than is sometimes claimed”.
There is no democracy, that is obvious, without transparency and without the fight against corruption and injustice. Heard that Putin is more monstrous than ever. But it will not be enough, to get us out of illiberalism, for our political leaders to give us hollow phrases about the clash between “democracies” and “autocracies. »