Vladimir Putin is not afraid to be seen as unsympathetic and brutal. On the contrary. When asked one day if the stories surrounding his supposed hoodlum adolescence on the streets of Leningrad in the late 1960s were not a bit exaggerated, he took offense and instead proudly claimed them: “Yes, yes, I was a thug!” »
Last Wednesday, his war in Ukraine having just entered its third month, the thug in question agreed to receive the UN Secretary General, the discreet António Guterres, in the Kremlin. He conceded nothing to him, except perhaps a few evacuations of civilians in Mariupol.
The real “gift” came the next day, when his army fired missiles into central kyiv… precisely when Guterres was there. Obviously to humiliate his interlocutor and show how useless and ineffective the UN is.
One wonders what Mr. Putin thinks he has gained by making yet another enemy. António Guterres had however been careful, while deploring and denouncing this war, not to make statements likely to directly point the man from the Kremlin.
Putin hasn’t missed a thing from the start.
He believed that Russian speakers in Ukraine would welcome the Russian army as a liberator. In the very Russian cities of Kharkiv and Mariupol, resistance has been fierce. Ditto in Odessa, where the Russian army is awaited resolutely… if it ever dared or could push that far.
No one has done as much as Putin to unify the long undetermined, uncertain and divided nation of Ukraine. This people today aspires to become everything that Russia is not, and that Russia wants to prevent it from being: democratic, European, pro-Western… anti-Russian.
Banking on the division of Westerners, Putin provoked the opposite result, pushing them to spend ever more to support the resistance. Joe Biden has pledged to sink tens of billions into Ukraine’s war effort, which Washington now deeply identifies with…which was absolutely not the case in the beginning.
This week, European countries could decide on an embargo on Russian oil. Of course, the question remains open as to how long such support can continue, if this war were to last for months or even years.
One can ironically (but seriously) wonder if Putin will continue to provide his enemies so regularly, through his provocations and escalation, with good reason to continue.
On February 24, however, no one would have bet a kopeck on Zelensky, or on a war that would turn out so badly for Moscow.
Many hoped for a quick outcome that would have made it possible to negotiate certain Ukrainian concessions (Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk), while maintaining the sacrosanct supplies of Russian gas and oil… and perhaps even lifting part of the sanctions. In the last week of February, one could find many influential politicians in Berlin and Rome, and even in Paris or Washington, ready to push in this direction.
Proof that Zelensky was not the toy of Westerners: his first action, the day after the aggression, was precisely to resist these temptations for a rapid “settlement”… after a largely anticipated lightning defeat.
He forcefully rebuffed Washington’s offer to get on a plane and leave the country. It is he, with the Ukrainian people traversed by an unprecedented existential spasm, who forced Westerners to support him. And not the other way around: the supposed “pawn” pushed into confrontation by the villainous NATO “warmongers”, as Russian propaganda and its Western anti-American relays claim.
Will the Ukrainians armed by the West continue their “miracle of the steppe”? Could the Russian military go so far as to completely lose the war on the ground? Will a cornered Putin pull out his chemical and nuclear weapons? Nobody knows. But the miracle is already there.
François Brousseau is an international affairs columnist at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]