In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, a large commission of inquiry was set up so that we could understand what could have led to such a tragedy. It was a question of understanding how the first power in the world could have been so naive and oblivious to the rise of political Islam. Among the many explanations, one detail was striking. While the illusion of the “end of history” reigned, in the American secret services partly privatized after the fall of the Berlin wall, it was discovered that the Pentagon had very few experts who could read Arabic. .
One would have to wonder how many in Europe can read Russian today. And above all, how many know the history of Russia and know, for example, that in order to defeat Napoleon, the tsar’s army did not hesitate to burn Moscow. Shortly before dying, Henry Kissinger had himself deplored the historic lack of culture of the new diplomats. However, if one thing is striking, it is the constancy for many years of Vladimir Putin’s imperial thought. An axis from which he has never varied since that time when, during the first years of his reign, he truly flirted with Western democracies.
Putin never digested the terrible political, economic, moral and cultural decay that resulted from the collapse of the USSR. You should never forget that. For twenty years, his obsession has therefore been to restore Russia’s rank by reconstituting a power whose voice carries in the world and which would be able to dialogue directly with Washington and Beijing. Until very recently, this comeback has been spectacular. Convinced that Europe counts for plums and is only the plaything of NATO, Putin has radically turned away from it and treats it like a dwarf and a vassal of the United States.
In this, the master of Moscow reconnects with the temptation of the empire which is permanent in Russian history. Temptation which is also one of the causes of his misfortune, as the great Solzhenitsyn explained. Who remembers that at the time of the USSR, Russia was the neglected part of this empire and that it was visibly impoverished in order to maintain an imperial status that was cracking everywhere?
We can reproach Vladimir Putin for many things, but certainly not for having concealed his intention to create a Eurasian power and to resurrect by all means his sphere of influence. This “near abroad”, to put it in the terms of Russian diplomacy, is all the more important as the country is affected by a serious demographic crisis. This is why Russia has not stopped distributing Russian passports to Russian speakers in neighboring countries.
In 2008, the man whom diplomat Hubert Védrine describes as “a blade” warned that if Ukraine ever joined NATO, it could lose its eastern part and Crimea. Could we be clearer? It was also at the time of the annexation of the latter, on March 18, 2014, that he described Ukraine as “a state that should never have been separated from Russia”. And once more.
This doesn’t tell us how far Putin might go in this war or what his precise goals are, but it should convince us that he is not giving in on a whim let alone madness.
In Moscow, we are convinced that Ukraine is being used by the United States to “provoke Russia and draw all of Europe into the war”, as the intellectual and former minister Sergey Glaziev wrote. If this opinion is debatable, let us note that the Russian strategists seem to have forgotten a fundamental fact and not the least: the Ukrainian people.
Because, thanks to geopolitical rivalries, this people is in full awakening. Quebecers know better than anyone that there is nothing like conquest or aggression to unite a people and awaken a nation. There are many cases in history. This is how a sympathetic actor of sitcom propelled president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is transformed in a few days into a national hero.
Even if there aren’t many Russian families that don’t have a Ukrainian parent in their midst, the policy that Russia has been pursuing for 20 years has done everything to transform these two brotherly peoples into enemy peoples. For once, even Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine showed little enthusiasm for seeing big brother invade them. This is perhaps Vladimir Putin’s greatest failure.
The unity of this people, who voted 90% for their independence in 1991, seems to be at its peak. Even the leader of the Orthodox of Kiev, subject to the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Onuphry, rebelled against his hierarchy. He compared this invasion to the “sin of Cain who killed his own brother”.
When the guns have fallen silent, however, it will be necessary to realize that Ukraine is located on a dividing line between two worlds and that it will never be able to belong definitively to one. Its subjection to Russia or its dismemberment would be a real ignominy. But its integration into NATO would inevitably appear as a permanent declaration of war on Russia. A Russia to which the Europeans will have to find a way to speak again one day.