It is not easy to decipher Vladimir Putin, to decode his steely face.
One of the leaders of the free world who knows him best is probably Angela Merkel, ex-Chancellor of Germany. In a biography just published, The Chancellor, the Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkelwritten by Kati Marton, former bureau chief of ABC News in Germany, Merkel asserts that “Putin’s model is the dictator Stalin”.
The latter was, with Hitler, one of the cruellest dictators of the XXand century. Stalin is said to have had ten million of his own citizens killed in repeated purges, in addition to the ten million Soviet servicemen who died in World War II. When his soldiers returned to Russia after defeating the Nazis in 1945, Stalin abandoned them to their fate. Stalin is also blamed for the genocide of nearly five million Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933, following a famine caused by the sale abroad by the state of crops stolen from peasants.
The ex-Chancellor has met Putin and spoken to him many times. Born in East Germany and having studied in Russian, Angela Merkel mainly exchanged in this language with the head of the Kremlin. She knew the Stasi well, the secret police of East Germany, the equivalent of the Soviet KGB, where Putin learned to lie, to deceive, to manipulate. He has lost nothing of what he learned there.
“Putin uses other people’s weaknesses,” Merkel said. He is constantly testing you. If you don’t resist, you always get smaller. He always seeks to intimidate and dominate. Knowing that Merkel was afraid of dogs, having been bitten twice, Putin came upon an encounter with a fat, off-leash Labrador who went to feel his crotch (a photo shows him in the book). “He did this to show his manhood,” Merkel said.
Putin arrives late to his meetings to show himself important. Merkel having pointed this out to him, Putin replied: “That’s how we are. To which Merkel replied: “That’s not how we are”, to show that she would not let herself be imposed by the Kremlin’s ill-learned.
Putin bulged out his chest when Barack Obama called him in 2014 to try to convince him not to annex Crimea and to end the war in Donbass (13,000 dead). The new czar was surely filled with happiness at Donald Trump’s repeated bowing, which he quickly stuffed into his little pocket. His ego has no doubt been inflated again during his recent meetings with Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Sholtz, Naftali Bennett, etc., and during his telephone exchanges with Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Tayyip Erdogan and others, of whom he otherwise mocks. Everyone comes out empty-handed. Putin does not negotiate. Merkel says he is isolated. “He is surrounded by flatterers who tell him what he wants to hear. »
38 conversations with Putin
During the 2014 invasion of Crimea and Donbass, Merkel spoke 38 times with Putin in an attempt to reason with him, but to no avail. “How can I negotiate with someone who lies all the time? she told Obama, who felt less able than Merkel to negotiate with him during this crisis.
Both Merkel and Obama were then opposed to sending missiles and other weapons to Ukraine, whose army was ill-equipped and numbered only 30,000 men. The war in Donbass was temporarily halted by the Minsk agreements (2014 and 2015), but the Russian army continued to occupy the claimed territories.
Putin understood that Obama barked more than he bit. The American president had indeed tolerated Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons against his people, thus crossing the red line he had nevertheless drawn to prevent him from doing so. Ally of the Syrian dictator, Putin sent his planes to bomb the city of Aleppo. Al-Assad supports Putin in his rampage of Ukraine.
Missiles in Ukraine?
Quoted by Kati Marton, renowned historian Timothy Snyder (Yale), author of the hit The Road to Unfreedom, maintains that it was “a serious error not to have sent in 2014 missiles and other weapons to Ukraine which was fighting for its survival. We would have shown that the invasion of Ukraine was a serious matter”.
The Kremlin dictator was not punished, with the result that we see today: the historic and totally unjustified invasion of a country of 44 million inhabitants, which could lose its sovereignty and become the vassal of a cruel autocrat.
However, “history has taught us a lesson. When dictators don’t pay for their aggression, they cause even more chaos, with costs and threats continuing to mount,” Joe Biden said in his May 1 speech.er march on the state of the nation. This is also what the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, says in another way when speaking of the Russian dictator: “If you let him take Ukraine, he will not stop and he will attack another country. »
Despite his regime of terror, Stalin was never arrested. After his sudden death at age 75, in 1953, five million people would have paraded in front of his catafalque. Scenes of collective hysteria have been reported, during which 1,500 people are said to have been trampled or suffocated to death. Nostalgic people still lay flowers on his tomb, in an alley lined with fir trees along the Kremlin.
But Stalin himself had no atomic weapons at his disposal.