Putin’s OBSESSION

Since the mid­dle of the first decade of the cen­tury, sev­eral an­a­lysts have pointed to the seeds of a new war be­tween Vladimir Putin’s Rus­sia (aided by his alter ego Dmitry Medvedev) and NATO (the United States and the Eu­ro­pean Union), now led by Joe Biden. There is no short­age of ar­gu­ments, and they al­ways point to­wards the same seem­ingly un­ques­tion­able facts: cuts in Russ­ian gas sup­plies to Ukraine (2006, 2009 and 2014) that have af­fected the EU and caused a rise in prices dur­ing the win­ter months; the Russ­ian in­va­sion of Geor­gia and recog­ni­tion of the re­publics of Abk­hazia and South Os­se­tia in Au­gust 2008 in re­sponse to Geor­gian Pres­i­dent Mikheil Sakhav­ili’s process of rap­proche­ment with the US and EU – Sakhav­ili has been ex­iled to Ukraine since 2013, where he was gov­er­nor of Odessa Oblast be­tween 2015 and 2016 – he was ar­rested when he re­turned to Geor­gia in 2021; the an­nex­a­tion of Crimea and covert in­ter­ven­tion in east­ern Ukraine in favour of the pro-Russ­ian rebels in Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014; and con­tin­u­ing threats to the Baltic re­publics for dis­crim­i­na­tion against Russ­ian mi­nori­ties. At the same time, a new arms race began in 2002, with Pres­i­dent Bush uni­lat­er­ally aban­don­ing the 1972 Anti-Bal­lis­tic Mis­sile (ABM) Treaty and an­nounc­ing with­drawal from the 1987 Treaty on Medium Range Nu­clear Forces, to­gether with the con­duct­ing of new nu­clear weapons tests by the two pow­ers. Other au­thors talk of a hy­brid con­flict with its epi­cen­tre in Ukraine, wit­nessed in com­puter at­tacks al­legedly per­pe­trated by Russ­ian in­tel­li­gence ser­vices on in­sti­tu­tions and elec­toral processes in sev­eral West­ern coun­tries – in­clud­ing the 2016 US pres­i­den­tial elec­tions – and, of course, as Sylvie Kauff­mann stated in a re­cent ar­ti­cle in Le Monde, the war of nerves un­leashed in NATO and Kiev due to the de­ploy­ment of more than 100,000 Russ­ian sol­diers on the bor­ders of Ukraine.

De­spite Boris John­son’s warn­ing that the in­va­sion of Ukraine would be a dis­as­ter for both Rus­sia and the whole world, Brus­sels’ threat of eco­nomic sanc­tions on Moscow and the call for fur­ther ne­go­ti­a­tions by the EU’s High Rep­re­sen­ta­tive for For­eign Af­fairs and Se­cu­rity Pol­icy, Josep Bor­rell, NATO’s re­sponse has led to the sce­nario of a pos­si­ble war in Eu­rope be­com­ing more cred­i­ble. It has de­clared a “state of alert” and is send­ing troops and planes to the east­ern coun­tries of the al­liance, and ships to the Baltic and the Black Sea. For its part, the US has an­nounced plans to in­crease its mil­i­tary pres­ence on NATO’s east­ern bor­ders, while re­mov­ing non-es­sen­tial staff and fam­i­lies of diplo­mats from its Kiev em­bassy and ad­vis­ing against travel in Rus­sia (Lon­don, which re­cently de­liv­ered mis­siles to Kiev, has taken sim­i­lar mea­sures, and Paris ad­vises avoid­ing non-es­sen­tial travel to Ukraine). The Czech Re­pub­lic (the Prague gov­ern­ment ac­cuses the Russ­ian se­cret ser­vices of being in­volved in the ex­plo­sion of an arms fac­tory in the coun­try last year), the Baltic re­publics, France, Spain, the Nether­lands and Den­mark are all ready to send troops to Lithua­nia, Ro­ma­nia and Bul­garia and pledge mil­i­tary aid to Kiev, while Ger­many re­fuses to allow Es­to­nia to pro­vide weapons of Ger­man ori­gin to Ukraine, and Macron is in­sist­ing on di­a­logue. Against the back­drop of the cur­rent cri­sis lies the ob­ses­sion of Vladimir Putin, a for­mer KGB of­fi­cial in the Ger­man De­mo­c­ra­tic Re­pub­lic, who is forg­ing his power thanks to the two wars in Chech­nya while re­ject­ing the man­dates of his men­tor, Boris Yeltsin. Over­whelmed by ill health and al­co­hol, Yeltsin made Rus­sia a vic­tim of the greed of West­ern mar­kets and or­gan­i­sa­tions, and wants to re­gain the splen­dor of the Stal­in­ist USSR, claim­ing his role as Joseph Stalin, but with­out any hint of com­mu­nism, as that would call into ques­tion his eco­nomic and dic­ta­to­r­ial power.

As Car­men Claudín rightly pointed out in an ar­ti­cle in El País, Putin’s ob­ses­sion is to re­gain the sphere of in­flu­ence agreed by Stalin at the 1945 Yalta Con­fer­ence (which, on the So­viet side, re­pro­duced the di­vi­sion of Eu­rope by Hitler and Stalin, but now with­out Ger­many), and for this he has ap­pealed to na­tional sen­ti­ment, up­dat­ing the pre-So­viet myth of the Russ­ian giant sur­rounded and threat­ened by West­ern pow­ers. And so, de­spite los­ing the Baltic re­publics for the time being, he has drawn a red line on Rus­sia’s bor­ders, a kind of de­fence zone that cor­re­sponds to the bor­ders of the for­mer So­viet re­publics. This ex­plains the in­ter­ven­tions in Geor­gia, Ukraine, the re­cent in­ter­ven­tion in Kaza­khstan and the use of the Be­laru­sian despot Alek­sandr Lukashenko to put Poland and Lithua­nia under pres­sure with an un­con­trolled and fi­nanced ar­rival of refugees from the Mid­dle East and Africa. The prob­lem is how to stop Putin’s ob­ses­sion and his will to im­pose on neigh­bour­ing coun­tries with­out re­sort­ing to a war that would desta­bilise Eu­rope, threaten world peace, and turn his dream into Eu­rope’s night­mare.

opin­ion