Vladimir Putin’s Distrust of the West Comes From Very Far Away.

The most worrying thing is that it now seems unmovable.

When Vladimir Putin loudly demanded that the West pay for Russian gas in rubles, the second part of his speech went unnoticed. It was on March 31, 2022. The ambivalent words of the head of the Kremlin revealed his state of mind about the West.

“Not hatred, just contempt for this West that has frustrated him but that he wants to seduce”, slips a Russian lawyer, a fine observer of the political and psychological evolutions of the Russian president. After explaining to the Russians that these payments in rubles will strengthen “our financial and economic sovereignty”, Vladimir Putin addressed the Europeans directly and warned them against “a drastic drop in the standard of living of our citizens”.

Vladimir Putin then returned to his diplomatic tirades:

“Some European politicians are ready to neglect the interests of their citizens, just to please their suzerain across the Atlantic. Populism in reverse: people are encouraged to eat less, dress more warmly, give up traveling ... in the name of an abstract North Atlantic solidarity!”

Supreme hypocrisy in the eyes of the Russian president, for whom Ukraine is a battleground in his distant confrontation with the United States, accused of capitalizing on global instability, in 1940 as in the wars in Iraq and Syria.

Putin has always seen Kosovo's independence as an “affront” to Russia

These diatribes are rooted in history. In September 2001, the president was the first to call the White House in solidarity after the attack on the World Trade Center. His vain attempts at rapprochement have subsequently intensified frustration and disdain. Regularly, Vladimir Putin returns to the "affront" made to Moscow with the independence of Kosovo.

And on what the Kremlin calls the coup d'état in Kyiv in February 2014, during which the West did not respect their commitments and let the Maïdan rebels take power. This is an obsession for Vladimir Putin, who has a long memory and a long grudge. But also for the Putinian elites, proud to have won Crimea, frustrated to have lost Ukraine, this brother country where the Russian history and that of its Orthodox Church are anchored.

Since then, the Kremlin's television stations, formidable sounding boards for these ideas, present Russia as a victim of a Russophobic West. They present the economic sanctions against Moscow not as a consequence of the intervention in Ukraine, but as a way for the West to attack Russia. With a drop of more than 10% in GDP, the country is facing its worst recession since 1994.

A hunt for the “Fifth Column”

Faced with a West considered “weak” and its democratic values “hypocritical”, Vladimir Putin feels superior in his defense of a Russia attached to its conservative values. The president, whose thought software escapes Western rationality, is opposed to a democratic system that threatens his regime. He has launched a hunt for the “Fifth Column”.

Until now, he has tolerated Westerners abroad and liberals in Moscow because they were useful to him. Now they are the enemy, even within the country, because the interests of the state take precedence over individual freedoms.

The insolent strength of the ruble

Between imperialist tirades and blows against abhorred Western values, Vladimir Putin's intentions remain unfathomable, he who, after twenty-three years at the top of the power, had nevertheless given the impression of having reached a modus vivendi with the West.

On the morning of February 21, 2022, he had on his table the offer of a summit with his American counterpart Joe Biden, the Western recognition of his power, and the possibility of continuing his arm wrestling with the West through diplomacy. But in the evening he appeared in a long televised monologue full of accumulated resentment and cold anger. He denied the existence of modern Ukraine, a real slap in the face to the West, and launched his “special military operation” in the heart of Europe.

A little more than a month later, not unhappy to have provoked a wave of migration in Europe threatening the stability of the host countries now considered “unfriendly”, Vladimir Putin counter-attacked by demanding the payment in rubles of Russian gas. A fool's game, where buyers pay for gas in euros and Gazprom receives in rubles, strengthening the Russian currency.

After a month of decline, the strength of the ruble is used to prove to the Russians that they are resisting the sanctions and pressures from the West. Putin wants to show that he has won a battle against the West in the ruble war.

With his appeal to European consumers and citizens, Vladimir Putin hopes to touch public opinion, which he knows is discontented and unstable throughout Europe. While denouncing the “fascists” in Kyiv and justifying its military offensive by the need to “denazify” Ukraine, the Kremlin has supported the far right in Europe from a distance in recent years. In the corridors of power, advisors do not hide having been “disappointed” by the presidential defeat in France of Marine Le Pen against Emmanuel Macron, defender of a stronger Europe. But, in this conflict with the appearance of a war of civilizations, the Kremlin is keeping its course against the West.