The 3 Enemies Vladimir Putin Is Fighting With His War in Ukraine.

Russian opponents, Ukraine, and the West.

The West has been mistaken about Putin's Russia for years. We wanted to see a country that was modernizing and putting itself “in order”, refusing to open our eyes to the neo-totalitarian and neo-imperial “political animal” that was resurfacing from the rubble of communism. We spoke lightly of “strategic partnership” while Putin began the internal and external reconquest of power and empire by brute force and corruption, then by the violation of his international commitments and hybrid warfare within our walls.

We believed that the shimmering windows of Moscow were the proof of the emergence of Russian civil society, while the latter was beaten back and a large part of the people, caught in a “Versailles syndrome” reminiscent of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, chose to embrace the messianism of revenge of its leader.

From this point of view, the war that broke out in Europe caught chancelleries off guard, even though most Eastern European countries and a substantial fraction of Western Russologists had been sounding the alarm for years. “Winter is coming,” the former world chess champion and Putin opponent Garry Kasparov announced in a prescient book as early as 2015.

Why have those who knew not been heard? What cocktail of ignorance of the deep reality of the regime's motives, but also of cynicism, pusillanimity, supposedly “realistic” postures, and strictly energetic or commercial interests has led to our inability to stop the dangerous ideological, political and geopolitical revisionism unleashed by Putin since his arrival in power?

Taking the measure of what must be called a strategic disaster and reflecting on the means to respond to it is something essential for the future in a geopolitical context of rare danger. Since the master of the Kremlin launched his tanks and missiles on Ukraine, letting loot, kill and rape without complexes, we witness live on continuous television channels and social networks the daily horror of a high-intensity war that threatens at every moment to go over the fragile borders of the European Union and NATO.

Vladimir Putin is the only culprit for this war in Ukraine

Today, it is the Belarus of the dictator Alexander Lukashenko that could tip over into the conflict on the Russian side, increasing the possibility of an extension of the confrontation inside the Atlantic Alliance. In particular, the Lithuanian corridor separating Russia from the Kaliningrad enclave appears highly vulnerable, as well as certain Baltic territories such as the Estonian region of Narva, which President Putin recently provocatively declared to be former Russian lands.

The regime's television propagandists like Vladimir Soloviev and his daily guests are constantly issuing threats of invading Poland, even bombing Paris or London, rhetoric that we need to take seriously as the sickening rise of the theme of the “denazification” of Ukraine since the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and what it has produced has shown.

All of these signals, which can no longer be called “weak,” and which are corroborated by a wealth of literature from the regime's ideologues, make it clear - whether we like it or not - that we have become co-actors in a more global confrontation that Russia has been engaged in for years against the West, including by attempting to directly influence our internal political processes. Finland and Sweden, drawing the consequences of this precarious situation, will join NATO.

The first element to remember again and again, in this moment of great threat, is that it is indeed the logic of Putin's power, its deep nature, which led to the war, and not the supposed aggressive “encirclement” of Russia by the West, nor the supposed “Nazification” of Ukraine. Some people in our country still doubt this, but they would do well to open their eyes to reality.

The West is now paying for years of weakness in the face of Vladimir Putin

Contrary to what Vladimir Putin claims, shaped by his Chekist mentality as a former KGB officer, the USSR did not collapse in 1991 under the pressure of a vast Western plot but as a result of its unmanageable and obvious contradictions. Certainly, the West can be criticized for having been taken by surprise, and not very capable of inventiveness in the face of this major historical turning point. Its advice on the transition from communism to capitalism, drawn from the school of the ultraliberal boys of Chicago, was catastrophic, let's admit it, and the TACIS (Technical Assistance to the Commonwealth of Independent States) programs, to help democracy, were quite insufficient.

But neither Mitterrand, Kohl, nor Bush senior wanted the collapse of the Soviet Union, and they did not hesitate to make it known, especially to the Ukrainians. Moreover, all these years, the West - if it has legitimately welcomed into NATO and the European Union a good part of Central and Eastern Europe that was once “kidnapped”, according to Milan Kundera's word - has always chosen to accommodate Putin, whether in Paris, Berlin, Rome or Washington, even after the invasion of Georgia and the annexation of the Crimea.

Let us remember the great attempt, quickly aborted, to revive the Franco-Russian relationship by Emmanuel Macron at Brégançon in the South of France in the summer of 2019. From this point of view, Russia, despite the embarrassing refrain of French and German politicians and “realists” has not been “humiliated” by the West but by history, which has shown the dead-end of the catastrophic choice that was communism.

Far from recognizing this, and having encouraged the trial of communist totalitarianism, which after seventy years of existence, had left Russia humanly bled and morally disoriented, Putin chose to resume his violent methods and his art of lying.

Garry Kasparov wisely explains that Putin acts by erasing what has happened since 1991

Today on Russian soil, after the euphoria of freedom of speech in the 1990s, 2+2 is again 5, as in Orwell's novel “1984”. And the master of the Kremlin casts himself unashamedly in the clothes of an heir to the tsars, but also Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, to claim an ideology of victory and of the return to the glory of the past that justifies all his actions, from internal repression to external invasion.

“Putin thinks he is in 1991, he is erasing the last thirty years as if they had never happened,” notes Garry Kasparov.

Could we have imagined, in August 1991, in the jubilation of the destruction of the statue of the sinister chief of the Soviet political police Felix Dzerzhinsky, in front of the headquarters of the KGB, that this organization would come back in force to the commands of the country and that Putin would try to bring back Ukraine by iron and blood to this red past by invading its territory and planting again red flags and statues of Lenin, as it happened in Kherson when Russia was the guarantor of Ukraine's independence?

Could we have guessed that thirty-one years after the end of the USSR, a deputy of the Duma was going to demand that the resolution of the Russian Parliament recognizing the independence of Lithuania is reversed, with all shame?

“The unabashed nature of these steps and statements is particularly disturbing,” notes Russia specialist Galia Ackerman, who has studied this ideology of victory in her recently republished book “The Immortal Regiment”. She notes that “the idea that power can afford anything is contained in the phrase 'We are not ashamed' that Russian leaders now use every day to justify war and repression in the name of the legitimacy of history”.

Their certainty, Ackerman continues, is to embody a civilization superior to Western civilization, which would be doomed to decadence. “This means that as long as they are allowed to advance, they will advance,” warned a representative of Russian civil society in Moscow.

In the early days of the war, Pavel Fischer, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Czech Senate, spoke of “a Russian train that has derailed, and is hurtling at full speed towards Europe, not only towards Ukraine”. Without brakes.

Putin is fighting 3 enemies with his war in Ukraine

Putin's regime is fighting three enemies at the same time: the Russian opponents, for the moment defeated, Ukraine, which is resisting, and the West, which is mobilizing but remains fragile and divided.

The Russian historian Vladimir Pastoukhov recently explained that there is an intrinsic link between the dynamics of the dictatorship at home and the export of war and confrontation. “This war is the inevitable consequence of the evolution of the Putinian regime, which being afraid of the revolution, and wishing to preserve its power, sees no other way than to deport this evolution towards the outside by an aggression”, he explains.

“All Putin's wars are a form of sublimation of the civil war, a continuation of the war he is waging against his people”, Pastoukhov explains. Ukraine has become the obsessive target because it embodies, in the mind of the Kremlin, a real threat to it as a part of “the Russian world” that rebels against the totalitarian option and chooses freedom for the Ukrainian nation and its citizens.

Crushing Ukraine thus becomes vital to maintain control in Russia. “It is the battle of the orange man against the red neo-totalitarian hurricane, a choice between Hannah Arendt and Orwell. Ukraine shows its refusal of the civic as well as national death of its people”, explains the Ukrainian philosopher Constantin Sigov, speaking of a very clear choice in favor of the European, Western option, against the Putinian option.

This reasoned collective choice of the Ukrainians, as a nation and as a civil society, explains the extraordinary resistance that they have deployed on military and moral levels since February 24. This is the second major fact to remember here because the emergence of the Ukrainian nation, its resolutely democratic choice, and its capacity to fight will upset the map of Europe for a long time. Sigov speaks of a “treasure” and a miraculous chance for the European democracies in crisis because the Ukrainian resistance offers the hope to stop the Putinian hurricane and to regain confidence if the West does not shirk its responsibilities.

The big question is who will hold the showdown the longest between the West and Vladimir Putin

For the moment, and this is the third important observation of this state of affairs that can be made after several months of the war, the West has shown an unexpected unity and resolution in the face of Putin's attack on Ukraine. Unprecedented sanctions were quickly put in place, and continue to be extended, notably to the energy sector, which is particularly sensitive because of the heavy dependence of European economies on Russian gas and oil.

A total revision of our energy policy is underway. Countries like Germany or Bulgaria, ultra-vulnerable, are frantically looking for alternative options to the blue gold of the great Russian neighbor. Nato is also putting itself in military battle order to prevent any extension of the conflict. The Atlantic Alliance has decided to “transform its reaction force and to rise well above 300,000 troops to a high level of readiness”, said Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

And arms shipments to Kyiv are accelerating. The question is whether this mobilization of the West and its unity will persist, despite the predictable fatigue of public opinion and the inevitable internal tensions that will be felt on the economic and energy front. Deep fractures are already palpable throughout our societies, plunged in a deep identity crisis, and some of their segments, are fascinated by the “strong man of the Kremlin” and sensitive to his propaganda.

Convinced that Putin's dictatorship is better than Western postmodern abulia. All the difficulties of the current situation will come in the next few months from how the geopolitical challenge of Putin's war and the crisis of our democracies will intertwine. Will we stay the course in the information battle that is beginning? Will we resist the sirens of pacifism called realism, which wants to make territorial concessions, in the fallacious hope of stopping Putin and taking back the course of our lives?

As strategist Andrew Michta rightly notes, the West has only one option: to help Ukraine defend itself and not be baffled by the fear of escalation. “Defense is defense, not escalation,” he writes.

What would produce escalation would be to concede a piece of Ukraine to Putin's Russia, which loudly says it seeks “capitulation”. The appetite of dictators comes with eating. Conversely, staying the course on principles and aid to the attacked Ukraine will eventually make Putin back down. As the former Russian chess player Garry Kasparov notes, two hourglasses are running out: that of Russia's military capacity, which is massive but will wither under the straitjacket of sanctions. And that of the capacity of courage and persistence of our democracies.

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