Everything was settled perfectly. From the military review to the ballet of heads of state, including the speech of Emmanuel Macron, who is a master in this art of commemoration which consists of evoking history without forgetting the subtle allusions to the present. Not a thread stuck out. But there was a void. A huge void. Where was Russia?
We thought about inviting him. The rumor had circulated of a simple delegation of veterans. Moscow had declared itself open. Result: even the Russian ambassador to France was asked to stay at home. To honor the 27 million Soviets who fell under German bullets between June 1941 and May 1945 – who represent 88% of Allied losses in Europe – we were content to place flowers on a few graves. However, without the Eastern Front, would there never have been a victorious landing on the Western Front?
Obviously, it was not possible to invite Vladimir Putin while the war in Ukraine is getting bogged down and France, for some obscure reason, is increasing its pro-war speeches to the point of raise the possibility of sending men into the field. When we no longer control anything, as is the case with the end of the regime, verbal escalation (if not military) at least allows us to occupy media space.
This absence is not insignificant and represents a break. A break with the tradition that had been established since the fall of the Berlin Wall requiring Russia to participate in these commemorations, as in 2004 and 2014. But above all a break with the Gaullist vision that France is a country “capable of speaking to all”, as former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin mentioned.
Let us recall in passing that de Gaulle did not commemorate the Landing, believing that France should above all celebrate its own feats of arms. We will have to wait for François Mitterrand and the invitation extended to Ronald Reagan to pay this tribute to the Anglo-Americans. In this line, Macron is the first to spread these celebrations over three days… and to give a speech without mentioning the name of General de Gaulle!
Instead of Putin, we therefore invited Volodymyr Zelensky while avoiding recalling that the thousands of Ukrainians who fought Nazism did so in the Red Army. Ironically, the first French soldier killed on June 6, Corporal Bouétard, was killed by a detachment of Russian, Georgian and Ukrainian soldiers belonging to a Wehrmacht unit which included 80,000 Ukrainians. In polls immediately after the war, 57% of French people still remembered that Moscow had been the first architect of Victory. Sixty years later, 58% of them chose the United States, which lost a total of 400,000 men. Thanks Hollywood!
On the landing beaches, although the Westerners closed ranks behind the Ukrainian president, they poorly hid the impasse in which this conflict is engaged where neither party seems able to either lose or win. One would have dreamed that this commemoration could be the occasion for a first contact, as was the case during the Donbass war, that of 2014, from which a framework of negotiations involving Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany. But we’re not there.
While it is obviously necessary, in the name of Ukraine’s national independence, to prevent Putin from winning this war, it is increasingly difficult to imagine that it will return to its borders in the foreseeable future. ‘before the conflict. The heads of state and government who have paraded on the beaches these days are reduced to trying as best they can to prevent Ukraine from collapsing, which would obviously be a catastrophe. Unless there is an insane commitment by NATO against what remains, let us remember, the world’s leading nuclear power. A reality of which Emmanuel Macron does not always seem to be aware. Especially since unlike the Americans, for whom this war was entirely beneficial, the Europeans will not have the choice of one day being reconciled with their powerful neighbor.
Can we say without sounding like a Putin fanatic that the most likely outcome of this war is that no one will really win? Or at least that it will be long, perhaps to the point of ending with a Korean-style frost, which has lasted for 70 years?
We are emerging from a time when war was considered an anomaly, an exception, an artifact of the past, not to mention an oddity in the normal order of things. We not only believed in “the end of history”, but still live in the utopia of a world without borders. And we are paying a high price, as illustrated by the immigration crisis which is shaking all European countries and even the United States. Hence also our astonishment at the inevitable civilian victims of the war: 20,000 in Normandy, 40,000 in Dresden.
These illusions are deadly. They explain the West’s unpreparedness for war. As well as his inability to understand that Putin’s numerous warnings over the past 15 years against Ukraine’s integration into NATO were not a bluff. But our enemies do not share this Calinours ideology. They never believed in the disappearance of either war or borders. If the Landing ceremonies should remind us of one thing, it is this.