I am far from being an expert on Ukraine. I discovered it, in good part, because of this war of aggression waged on it by an enraged Vladimir Putin. As a faithful reader of the work of Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL), however, I have been in the front row to witness the ordeal of Ukrainians since 2014, when a pro-European revolution changed the course of things in this country.
You can think what you want of BHL, and I know that some readers of the Homework don’t think very highly of it, but honesty dictates that for years the activist writer has been one of the staunchest defenders of Ukraine under attack by Russia, when the world preferred to deflect the look. It is to him that I owe most of what I know about this martyred people.
In “Who’s Afraid of the XXIand century?” (The pocket book, 2017), volume XIII of his series Matters of principleBHL has devoted around a hundred pages to the Ukrainian situation since 2014. These twelve texts, grouped under the section title “With the Ukrainians”, which I reproduce here, are prophetic.
In February and March 2014, BHL delivered two speeches in Maidan Square, Kiev, in support of the ongoing revolution. “You, people of the Maidan, have a dream that unites you — and your dream is Europe. Not the Europe of accountants, the Europe of values. Not the Europe of bureaucrats, the Europe of the mind. Already at the time, Putin’s Russia was in turmoil. It is his Ukrainian puppet, Viktor Yanukovych, that the protesters want to overthrow. “Europe, continues BHL, must protect Ukraine. Not to do so would be tantamount to turning one’s back on one’s substance.
The following months herald the ongoing Russian aggression. In March 2014, the Republic of Crimea, Ukrainian territory since 1954, declared its independence and its attachment to Russia. In April, a civil war breaks out in the Donbass, a predominantly Russian-speaking region in the east of the country, between the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian separatists supported by Putin, who already claims to want to protect his Russian brothers from Ukraine against the “Nazis” at the head of the country. This conflict, never ended, would have caused at least 13,000 deaths. “And, as for us, careless Westerners, this forgotten war in Ukraine,” wrote BHL in On the road of nameless men (Grasset, 2021), his tragedy drop by drop […] should be our remorse. »
BHL, these days, is tirelessly active in the defense of Ukrainians, especially on the site of its magazine The Rule of the game. In 2014, he even dared to draw a parallel between Hitler and Putin. The latter, in fact, like the first, behaves like a “bandit” by eliminating his political opponents. It uses, moreover, a strategy of external action similar to that of Hitler, by implementing brutal imperialism – in Georgia in 2008, in Crimea in 2014, in all of Ukraine today -, which it justified by a discourse of self-defense – against a presumed invading NATO – and by the need to rescue the Russian-speaking minorities threatened by the “fascist assassins” in power in Ukraine.
Putin’s ideology, finally, a “eurasism” inspired by the far-right Russian intellectual Alexander Dougin, aims to reconstitute a geopolitical entity including Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine to repair the dissolution of the Soviet Union and oppose the democratic West.
Madness, this comparison between Putin and Hitler? In The duty of March 7, François Brousseau, in any case, takes it up. Putin does not advocate the extermination of the Jews, which is a fundamental difference, but his victimhood discourse, used to justify his aggressions, his spirit of historical revenge and his conviction to be in his rightful place by annexing the regions of other countries where Russian-speaking minorities live have Hitlerian accents, concludes Brousseau.
Putin is weak, wrote BHL in 2014, and the West is strong. Maybe, but what to do to be fully with the Ukrainians without making the situation worse? For the French geopolitical scientist Pascal Boniface, director of the Institute of International and Strategic Relations (IRIS), Putin, who wanted to defend the Russian national interest by bringing Ukraine closer to his country, by dividing Europe and by weakening the NATO, has failed everything since it has only managed, for the moment, to obtain the exact opposite, writes Boniface in his editorial of the 1er March on the IRIS website. Even the Russians are turning against him.
Meanwhile, however, innocent Ukrainians and young Russian soldiers are dying for madness. The West must not add blood to blood, but must do all it can to enforce a full ceasefire.