The Three Phases of Vladimir Putin’s War in Ukraine.
The war took a new turn and is now a European war.
Things are now clear. In his turn, the Austrian chancellor, Karl Nehammer, made the trip to Moscow on Monday, April 11, 2022, in the hope that representing a non-NATO country, he could extract something, a cease-fire, a concession perhaps, from Vladimir Putin in his war against Ukraine. He, too, has broken his teeth. It “was not a friendly visit”, he admitted on the way back. This interview, “hard”, with a Russian president “massively penetrated by a logic of war” made him “rather pessimistic”.
Another one who will have been disillusioned by the hardness and obstinacy of Vladimir Putin has led a war in three phases in Ukraine.
New military phase
There is reason to be pessimistic in the short and medium-term. The war crimes committed by the Russian army in the vicinity of Kyiv marked a turning point. Even the French president Emmanuel Macron, who is adept at maintaining the thread of dialogue with Vladimir Putin against all odds, has not spoken to him since 29 March 2022.
But, above all, a little more than 50 days after its outbreak, the Russian war in Ukraine has entered a new phase, military, ideological and geopolitical. And the second act of this European drama is going to be even harder. After the failure of the initial scenario of the lightning operation which aimed at overthrowing the power in Kyiv and taking control of the country, Moscow changed its strategy.
The Russian forces that were supposed to take Kyiv, defeated by the Ukrainian resistance, have withdrawn. The Kremlin wants to avoid getting bogged down in a guerrilla war on a territory that is too vast and rebellious. The action is now concentrated on the East and South-East, closer to the Russian bases. Mariupol has been bombed for weeks and is about to fall.
The Russian army is preparing an offensive on the whole of the Donbas. It will face the most seasoned and best equipped Ukrainian troops. Vladimir Putin, explain to his supporters in Moscow, needs a victory for his May 9 parade, a traditionally grandiose celebration of the victory of the “great patriotic war”: a Ukrainian trophy of the “special military operation” would be a timely arrival for Vladimir Putin. The Russian president has just estimated that the negotiations with Ukraine were “in a deadlock”. For him, “the operation will therefore be carried out to its conclusion”.
New ideological phase
In recent weeks, texts and interviews from Moscow have become more and more inflammatory about the reasons for the Russian operation. A premonitory book from 2006, “The Third Empire: Russia as It Ought to Be” (untranslated), written by Mikhail Yuryev, a former deputy speaker of the Duma who disappeared in 2019, describes with astonishing accuracy the war in Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014, and then the current invasion of Ukraine.
The book, note those who have read and commented on it, is a model of “post-Soviet medievalism, an anti-Western and anti-democratic ideology that assigns 'Russian Orthodox civilization' a dominant role over Europe and the United States.”
While measures are multiplying to lock up what remains of free expression, the official agency RIA Novosti is carrying inflammatory texts in the same vein. Foreign policy specialists previously welcomed in Western think tanks are being enlisted to promote the thesis of war against the West, such as Sergei Karaganov, who, in interviews with the New Statesman and Corriere Della sera, theorizes an “existential war” for Russia.
Here is what Sergei Karaganov explains:
“It is a kind of proxy war between the West and the rest for the future world order - Russia being, as it has been throughout history, the apex of the rest.”
Other experts, such as Dmitri Trenin and Fiodor Loukianov, try to justify the break with the West by the tipping of the world balance, in which Europe and the United States are the losers and Asia and Russia the winners. For their part, faced with the violence of the offensive and the barbarity of certain Russian units, the Ukrainians are also becoming more radical. Galvanized by the heroism of their resistance, they are convinced that it can only end in victory.
Even if President Volodymyr Zelensky remains open to negotiation, compromise will be difficult. For Ukraine, this war is truly existential. For it and for Europe, which it considers to be defending. “Who better than Ukraine is fighting for the security of Europe at this time?”, asked Ihor Zhovkva, one of President Zelensky's advisors, in a remote interview organized by the French Institute of International Relations. The political stakes of the war go far beyond the Moscow-Kyiv confrontation.
New geopolitical phase
Seeing itself as Europe's bulwark, Kyiv is asking Europeans for “weapons, weapons and weapons” with increasing insistence. In fact, despite their stated desire to avoid becoming co-belligerents, they are becoming more and more involved in the war. The hesitations of some governments on the gas embargo and arms deliveries become impossible to justify in the face of the absurdity of one figure: since the beginning of the war, the European Union's (EU) military aid to Ukraine amounts to 1 billion euros and the payment of its energy bill to Russia to 35 billion.
The level of Western military aid has also entered another phase, although not everything is public: tanks and air defense systems, in particular, are now being delivered to Ukrainian forces. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, wants to speed up the process of Ukraine's accession to the EU and went to Kyiv to say so. Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, followed her. The war in Ukraine is now European.
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