We didn’t see it coming. And yet the immense Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaïa assassinated in 2006 had warned: “One day Putin will go to war and the Europeans will be surprised to see that the war is also targeting them.” It is on this retrospectively chilling prophecy that the new salutary and synthetic essay by the Social Democrat MEP Raphaël Glucksmann begins: The Great Showdown, how Putin is waging war on our democracies (Allary Editions). The founder of the Public Square movement describes in detail how Russia has been preparing, for at least two decades, its revenge against the West and Ukraine. And this, by means of a hybrid war that has deeply destabilized democratic societies.
© / Allary Editions
This war without bombs or front line takes place on social networks where an army of trolls polarizes the public debate, on the media RT and Sputnik with blows of fake news, in Africa via the anti-French propaganda signed Wagner (the group of Russian mercenaries). It manifests itself in cyberattacks against Western institutions and companies and in recurring destabilizations in electoral processes. Finally, it mobilizes the “useful idiots” of the extreme right and extreme left, to which must be added the misguided political and economic elites who see nothing wrong with taking their golden retirement in a country hostile to France, provided that the borscht is good.
Raphaël Glucksmann is rather well informed: since 2020 he has chaired the European Parliament’s committee on foreign interference. In December 2022, the scandal of Qatargate has shown, if need be, the relevance of such a body. But with the Kremlin at work, it’s on a whole different scale. Because Russia has a century of know-how. From the creation of the Third Communist International (Comintern) in 1919, the purpose of the Russian-Soviet Empire was to protect and propagate the Bolshevik revolution by destabilizing the capitalist world. This is also the function of the KGB (created in 1954), which includes experts in social psychology responsible for studying the mechanisms of Western societies in order to better manipulate them or, depending on the context, destabilize them.
Even today, at the school of diplomats in Moscow, the famous MGIMO, 54 different languages are taught to future ambassadors (subsequently trained in intelligence techniques) so that they integrate perfectly into their country of assignment. . The mistake is, since the 1990s, to have sincerely believed in the pretty fable of the “end of history”. Meanwhile, Putin, in a victim posture – a constant of authoritarian regimes – was plotting his revenge. He really fooled us.