I try to make up my mind. I know that Vladimir Putin felt he was disrespected by the West; that NATO was trying – he believed – to corner him, to suffocate him; that his image as the hero of a resurgent Russia needed to be strengthened. What a fiasco his Ukraine campaign will have been!
I have read the long speeches of the Russian president, justifying this supposedly frugal “special operation” in Ukraine, which has become the savage intervention of his armies. I did not miss any of his presentations, claiming that the Ukrainian national entity is only a recent creation. And how to escape his paranoia in the face of the attitude of Westerners towards Russia, which he associates with contempt?
I try to connect all this in something coherent and yet, I only come to one observation: the immeasurable failure that was this decision, worthy of another era, to invade a neighboring country. His enemies are growing stronger; his old friends are wary; Russia itself mortgages its future for generations.
MISJUDGING NATO
The Russian president, believing that NATO had cheated his country at the time of the break-up of the USSR, demanded a move away from the limits of the Atlantic Alliance, a retreat towards the west. He obtained the opposite: Sweden and Finland, long recalcitrant, joined the ranks of the Western alliance.
Worse still, from Estonia to Bulgaria, fourteen NATO countries – in addition to Finland, whose membership has not even been completed – have just embarked on the development of a long line of air and missile defence, the “European Celestial Shield Initiative”, which will further restrict Russian military assets.
UNKNOWING UKRAINIANS
The head of the Kremlin saw himself as the savior of the Ukrainians, subjected to imaginary Nazi executioners. At best, his soldiers would be welcomed as liberators; at worst, they would break the most rebellious. The savagery of Russian aggression has turned – possibly forever – Ukrainians once morest their neighbors to the east.
More concretely, the representatives of the Atlantic Alliance, meeting this week in Brussels, agreed to draw up a ten-year plan for the reconstruction of the Ukrainian military industry. We will move from old Soviet military equipment and training to Western ways.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian army, which was cheap on the eve of the Russian invasion, finds itself equipped with pieces of armament with names more sibylline than each other – HIMARS, NASAMS, IRIS-T – and among the most sophisticated that exist.
MUTILATE RUSSIA
As for his dear Russia, it is she who will drag the ball of his madness the longest.
Its isolation on the international stage is deepening with two-thirds of UN member countries opposing it last week.
Russians can no longer travel as they had come to appreciate. Under personal, commercial and industrial sanctions, companies are cut off from this modern technology that Western countries, better than all the others, know how to develop and perfect. And help will not come from Beijing or New Delhi, which will not want to abandon such a pool of knowledge.
Vladimir Putin saw himself as Peter the Great of modern times, theimperator. His reign is likely to resemble more that of Ivan the Terrible, who left, in the 16th century, a weakened and devastated Russia.
