History, even breathless, stutters again. The world of yesterday overwhelms the present. The “never again” of yesterday, proclaimed so many times, is suddenly chased away by “always more”. Except that once again, barbarism has nothing to do with good pacifist feelings, it crushes them before our eyes in blood and the din of bombs, threatening Europe with Iskander tactical nuclear missiles.
Posted yesterday at 2:00 p.m.
The war in Ukraine is the tragic echo of the Chechen wars, it floats above our tired hopes for peace.
Already 30 years ago, General Lebed, Secretary of the Security Council charged by President Yeltsin with settling the Chechen problem, threatened NATO with reprisals if it continued its advance towards the east. Old warmongering refrain.
When the first Chechen war began on December 18, 1994, Defense Minister Pavel Grachev assured Yeltsin that it “would be a lightning war without bloodshed,” a blitzkrieg that would raze all opposition. Convinced of an imminent victory, the end of the fighting was scheduled for December 20. However, it will take a month to seize the presidential palace and another month to surround Grozny after having reduced it to ashes. Today, the resistant Ukraine in turn thwarts the Kremlin’s plans.
To the warlike rhetoric of the time (“an anti-terrorist operation”, “restoration of the constitutional order”, “liberation of Chechen cities” to restore the “Russian Land”), Putin today opposes the “Nazis and drug addicts” of Kyiv to the “Chechen dogs” of Grozny.
Putin took on the “Thucidyde play”, but this time what threatens the master of the Kremlin is not the emergence of a political and military power, it is the democratic contagion, a powerful acid capable of dissolving the foundations of Russian power.
It was not bayonets that pushed so many Central European countries into the arms of the European Union and NATO. It is the European democratic model, passionately claimed, no offense to European whiners who strive to see in it only an obsolete mirage.
Turning the shameful pages of history does not mean eradicating its existence. The West, horrified by the memory of the horrors of the XXand century, deliberately got bogged down in a frightened and sterile pacifism. The refusal at all costs of military conflicts, whatever the monstrosities in front of you, has forged the impunity of the autocrats. NATO, diagnosed as “brain dead”, could in no way scare Putin. Out of fear of war, out of cowardly relief, Europe stuffed itself with illusions and, from procrastination to setbacks, fed the expansionist ambition of Putin, a leader for whom reason of state takes precedence over all morality. . In his eyes, the virtuous Europe is only a worm-eaten Europe, lying at his feet, ready to be trampled on.
Russia has “kidnapped Europe”, in the words of Milan Kundera, a Europe steeped in doubts and anxieties. By refusing to give in to direct confrontation, to avoid total war, Europeans and Westerners are sacrificing Ukraine on the altar of a peace that is as utopian as it is vain. It is to be feared, once again, that the current caution of Western countries in the face of Russian aggression, far from being an insurance against a world war, is in reality for Putin only an encouragement to embark on it. , driven by neo-imperial nationalism.
However, from this disaster remains a fragile cause for hope: the regressive turn taken by the Russian president has put an end to the hopeless cacophony of Europe.
At present, diplomacy cannot be a way out of the current conflict, because it is only a sham. Convinced of his strength and his rights, a tyrant never negotiates, he imposes his dominating madness without yielding anything. Diplomacy is the art of naturally accepted limits. It is a sublime idea, provided that one of the parties is not deprived of everything that forges the conditions of its existence. For Putin, the hour is with the revenge, only matters to him to make disappear in the limbo of time the collapse of the USSR. Faced with the one who wants to “destroy Carthage”, we oppose the force not of words, inaudible under the din of bombs, but the terror of weapons.
When you believe in nothing but balancing the accounts, peoples are no more than an embarrassing abstraction, their sacrifice being just one more piece of military artillery. Like all tyrants before him, Putin is doomed because he is wrongly imbued with his power. However, “only God can, without danger to himself, be all-powerful” (Tocqueville). Defeated, the Ukraine will survive for a long time yet; winner, Putin will disappear under the heap of his own ashes.