War in Ukraine | Kiss Putin

It’s the kind of anecdote perfect for a show at the lie detectors by Patrice L’Ecuyer. On Valentine’s Day in 2002, I came within an inch of kissing Vladimir Putin on the mouth.

It’s a true story and a lot less superficial than it seems. Follow me.

So, in February 2002, a large Canadian delegation, led by Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, is in Moscow. At the time, there was a real global craze for the new boss of the Kremlin, who came to power with the new millennium. After all, this former KGB agent is a lot more presentable than Boris Yeltsin, his predecessor.

Vladimir Putin took the reins of the country by promising to rein in the mafia that plagues the country and the oligarchs who bought post-Soviet Russia at a low price. And he says loud and clear that Russia is ready for business.

The Russian economy, in full disintegration in the 1990s, is rebounding. In 2000, the country of 140 million people boasted economic growth of 8%. The following year, 5%. So it was a Boeing full of politicians – including nine provincial premiers – and Canadian business people that made the trip to Moscow.

On this Valentine’s Day, Vladimir Poutine and Jean Chrétien are holding a joint press conference in the Grand Kremlin Palace, the former residence of the tsars. The meeting with the media takes place in the very impressive hall of Saint-Vladimir, “a magnificent rotunda whose glass roof soars higher than a belfry of Saint-Basile’s cathedral”, wrote that day the political columnist of the SunMichel Vastel.

Me, I’m a freelancer and I’m at the start of a major report through the former Soviet republics, 10 years after the fall of the USSR. This press conference is a golden opportunity to make contacts.

After the press conference, after chatting with other journalists, I turn around. And there, I come face to face with Vladimir Putin walking in my direction. There’s only an inch between his face and mine. But the Russian president does not see me. Even though I’m taller than him. He looks through me.

The two big cold hands of a bodyguard grab me and push me out of the way. I land in the arms of a colleague. I feel a huge shiver.

That evening, I tell my Russian friends. “Be careful, I think your new president is a robot. They laughed a lot. Not me.

At the time, I was already suspicious of this former secret agent with the icy gaze. I had just returned from a report in Ingushetia and Chechnya. What I had seen and heard there sent chills down my spine. All the means seemed good, during this second episode of war against the Chechen separatists, to punish these people in search of independence from Moscow.

Young Chechen men were arrested in large numbers and sent to Russian “filtration camps”. Thousands never came back. Often, Chechen women recovered the disfigured corpse of their child or husband by paying bribes to Russian soldiers.

A rapporteur for the human rights organization Memorial (which the Russian Supreme Court has just banned), Natalia Estemirova explained to me that the Putin method was a hundred times harsher than the Yeltsin method, who was in office during the first segment of the war. That banning journalists from covering the war served to cover up abuse after abuse.

Anna Politkovskaya of the Novaya Gazeta was one of the few Russian reporters who defied the ban. She was murdered in 2006. Natalia Estemirova met the same fate in 2009. Their murders have never been clarified.

To this day, it is still unknown how many Chechen civilians perished in this war, which officially ended in 2009. Since then, Chechnya has been governed by a pro-Kremlin warlord, Ramzan Kadyrov.

In October 2002, at the end of my long report which lasted more than nine months, I was back in Moscow when a group of Chechen terrorists took some 700 people hostage in a theater. On October 26, Russian forces filled the theater with a mysterious gas that had put everyone in it to sleep. They killed the approximately 40 terrorists responsible for the hostage-taking. In the operation, a hundred hostages also perished.

After this outcome, which the Kremlin welcomed, many Russians were transfixed with fear. To win, at all costs, their leader was ready to sacrifice them. The whole thing reminded them of Soviet methods. Reason of State before human life.

But the West continued to embrace Putin. To see in him an ally for peace. To invite him to the G8.

In 2007, at the Munich Security Summit, Vladimir Putin gave a speech that set the stage for whatever was to come. In his jaw-dropping speech, he accused the United States of endangering the world by pursuing a unilateral international policy and continually expanding NATO eastward. “The Cold War left behind munitions that have yet to explode,” he warned.

The United States had downplayed his remarks, believing that Russian-American relations were at their best.

A year later, in 2008, Vladimir Putin launched a military assault on Georgia, in support of the South Ossetian separatists, but it was clear that the first objective of this intervention was to punish the Georgian government, which flirted far too strong with NATO.

Russia remained a member of the G8. Nevertheless.

“When I was 5 years old, in Sochi, my mother took me to see a hypnosis show. All the other kids in the arena obeyed the hypnotist’s orders. Not me. These days, I feel like I’m back in that arena. Everybody [en Russie] is hypnotized. Except me. »

It is with this anecdote that says a lot that Boris Nemtsov ended our interview in February 2015.

The former minister of Boris Yeltsin, who became an opponent of Vladimir Putin in the early 2000s, was one of the few who openly denounced the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 and the Russian government’s support for the Donbass rebels , in eastern Ukraine.

The 55-year-old politician, who had just completed his 12^and stay in prison, did not blame his fellow citizens, hypnotized by the news presented to them on television, completely controlled by the Kremlin. “They are told that Putin had no choice but to act in Ukraine because the United States was preparing to invade Crimea,” he said, discouraged.

At the time, Boris Nemtsov was worried about the immense and unprecedented power that Vladimir Putin had in his hands. More than all the czars and leaders of the Soviet Union, he believed. “Even Stalin had to consult his Politburo [son cabinet] “, noted the dissident, who was in the process of organizing a large demonstration to denounce the Russian regime and its expansionist aims.

Two days before this demonstration took place, less than two weeks after our interview, Boris Nemtsov was murdered in broad daylight as he walked across a bridge that spans the Moscow River and leads to Red Square and the Kremlin.

When I think back to all these episodes as well as to the Russian intervention in Syria to support the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad, I wonder how I could have thought – like many observers and Russian experts – whom Vladimir Putin bluffed by massing his troops on the Ukrainian border. That he was playing everything to wrest concessions from NATO, Europe and Joe Biden. That he had no interest in invading Ukraine.

How many times has the man exercised restraint in his handling of relations with his near stranger or his opposition? The answer is simple: never.

Is there another government that has been singled out for using radioactive material to poison a former spy-turned-presidential critic? The answer is simple: no.

Vladimir Putin is today an all-powerful but isolated leader with a nuclear arsenal at his fingertips. And he has shown us for 20 years that he is capable of anything.

Able to walk straight ahead without seeing that there are human beings in his path.

Twenty years later, the chill I felt after my almost Valentine’s Day kiss has turned into an electric shock.