Until recently, many in the West raved about Putin’s “strategic” qualities. It was reassuring to attribute the successes he seemed to collect to a political genius rather than to see its true causes: the weakness, complacency and ineptitude of Western leaders. As soon as the Russian president ventured into Ukraine and came up against a resolute adversary endowed with strategic talents, one could measure the mediocrity of Putin’s leadership. It remains to understand the causes.
When Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, the kremlinophiles on duty deployed treasures of eloquence to make us believe that Putin’s kagebist past would not matter. On the contrary, we were told, it was an asset: his KGB training had instilled in him a pragmatism and a breadth of vision not found in an ordinary post-Soviet apparatchik. The KGB was less corrupt than other Soviet administrations, it was suggested. This organization was learnedly presented to the French public as the equivalent of the ENA.
Blackmail, vodka, assassination
It is true that Putin’s training in the KGB and his first steps as a Chekist are important, but not for the reasons given by the Lubyanka apologists. Putin was programmed through KGB school where he was instilled with absolute faith in the effectiveness of manipulation: “There are three ways to affect men,” he once said on a your playful: “blackmail, vodka and the threat of assassination”. Putin sees the human race through his agent glasses. In an interlocutor, he instinctively looks for the weak point, the lever by which he can recruit him: corruption, vanity, affair of morals, intimidation. Its entire mode of government, all its action abroad bears this trademark and is impregnated by this Guebist DNA. He will surround himself with people on whom he has a compromising record, the only guarantee of loyalty in his eyes. He will strive never to act openly, to always take people by surprise. Putin conceives of politics as a series of parallel special operations: trained to manage compartmentalized networks of agents, he is totally devoid of an overall vision, and therefore of strategic thinking. Participants only need to know what concerns them directly; the information must be strictly contingent, and only management has the right to access the full table.
Band Leader Putin
The same thing for diplomacy: it is reduced to the extension beyond borders of the “vertical power” headed by the Kremlin, by the recruitment of foreign decision-makers and the development of networks of agents within the targeted countries. When seduction and bribery do not work, intimidation and blackmail are used. Putin does not see himself as a head of state but as a gang leader. His goal is to place men he controls in all the positions that matter, in Russia and abroad. It covers those who serve it, regardless of their incompetence, mistakes or crimes, in Russia and abroad. On the other hand, those whom he considers to have betrayed are ruthlessly punished, sometimes in a spectacular way, whether they are individuals (Litvinenko) or peoples (the Ukrainians).
He is obsessed with “color revolutions”, because these have brought down the teams patiently put in place by his services and reduced to zero long years of effort, all for the benefit of the Western adversary. Putin indeed imagines that the others are like him. The chekist blinders make him have a narrow perception of the human race. He only sees their weaknesses, flaws and baseness, because they are the instruments of manipulation, the levers of his power. He does not imagine that men can act on their own, without a hidden puppeteer pulling the strings. If we are demonstrating in the streets of Moscow in 2011, it’s because Hillary Clinton is plotting against the Kremlin and wants to mess with it. The paranoid reading of the world stems from the manipulative approach of men.
Initially Putin benefited from a prodigious chance, due to factors beyond his control: the surge in the price of hydrocarbons, the stimulating effect of the reforms implemented by his predecessors, the focus of Westerners on Islamist terrorism. But the Russian president took credit for these successes and convinced himself that the possibilities of manipulation were limitless. He did not see that his practices could turn against him, that the manipulator could become the manipulated. The system that worked so well in the beginning soon wore itself out on all sides.
Beni-yes-yes serviles
First, because the manipulator is incapable of renewing himself. He mechanically applies the processes that have succeeded for him without worrying about being inventive. He acts from clichés. However, the processes used end up becoming apparent by dint of being repeated and become ineffective. We have seen this in the West where the strings of Kremlin disinformation have been spotted and largely neutralized.
Then the docility ensured by the “kompromat” among the civil servants of the State apparatus and among the heads of companies is paid for by a vertiginous degradation of the ruling class, not only from the moral point of view, but also from the point of view of efficiency view: pawns cannot become talented administrators. The illusions nourished by Putin when he launched the war against Ukraine were due to the fact that he was surrounded by servile yes-men more concerned with consolidating his fantasies than with telling him the truth.
But above all Putin, because of his truncated perception of the human race, amputated in the representation he has of the ethical dimension, of the attachment to truth and justice, of the love of freedom, has shown himself unable to predict the reactions of Ukrainians and Westerners to its open aggression against Kiev. He believed the Europeans were tied down by their gas dependence; he believed he had enough moles in the Ukraine and the West to take him down in a few days. He believed he was dealing with demoralized societies ready to crawl past the Kremlin to keep warm. He underestimated the strength of public opinion in democratic countries. The Ukrainian resistance, that of free men refusing servitude, brought about a transformation in the West that was as profound as it was unexpected.
“The death of the West did not take place”
Oleksy Arestovych, an adviser to President Zelensky, best expressed this divine surprise : “Tectonic changes are at work. […] We are witnessing the awakening of the West. […] To be frank, before this conflict, I had already done my mourning for the West. I didn’t think he could express anything other than his ‘deep concern’ and offer us some handouts. However, he woke up: the death of the West did not take place, I can stop my mourning. We see him shake off to get rid of all the heaviness he has accumulated during decades of peace…”
The countries that were once the most mired in the nets of the Kremlin, Germany, France, Italy, are operating a recovery that was unthinkable a few months ago. Let us quote the interview with Oleksy Arestovych, this December 1: “It is France that delights me the most. [pour juger les crimes de guerre russes] ! Hats off!” Thus, the system of enslavement of Europe patiently deployed by the Kremlin for twenty years was reduced to nothing by the mad pride of a despot convinced that one could dominate men durably by ignoring what makes the ‘humanity.