Smiling, Vladimir Putin left the stage to join the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, who applauded him wildly. We are in September 2001. In office for more than a year, the Russian president receives a standing ovation at the Bundestag in Berlin. “The cold war is over”, “Russia is a friend of Europe”, just declared, a few minutes earlier, in fluent German, the former KGB agent based in Dresden, Germany of the Is.
It’s time to relax, ten years after the break-up of the USSR. Putin was the first head of state to call George W. Bush after the attacks on the World Trade Center two weeks earlier. We then hope for a historic rapprochement between East and West. It will never take place. The relationship with Washington does not take long to turn sour. The intervention in Iraq in 2003 marked a turning point. Based on lies, it convinces Putin that the right to interfere is a concept with variable geometry. And that the law of the strongest always prevails. The following year, distrust grew further with the integration into NATO of former Soviet republics and Eastern European countries. Putin feels surrounded and threatened. And saw his dream slip away, the one he never ceased to evoke in his writings, but which no one took seriously: to restore the greatness of Tsarist Russia, from the Urals to the shores of Odessa.
Until the day before the attack, on February 24, European chancelleries did not believe in the invasion of Ukraine. However, the head of the Kremlin has not ceased, for two decades, to use force. First in Chechnya, then in Georgia and Syria. And, from 2014, in Ukraine. “We did not understand what Putin wanted and we were wrong about Russia,” admits the former secretary general of the Quai d’Orsay, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne. The Arab revolutions, jihadism and the breakthrough of China gave the impression, wrongly, that the former USSR would no longer play the leading roles. “From the 1990s, the ‘house’ Sovietologists lost their influence,” recalls Pierre Conesa, then a senior official at the Ministry of Defence. Putin was underestimated for a long time… even ignored, in a Coué way, says Alain Richard, Minister of Defense under Lionel Jospin when Putin came to power: “The intelligence services have certainly provided the information that was needed, but successive leaders have not drawn the consequences. We preferred to say to ourselves “it will work out” and minimize the problem.”
The indicators turn red, however, during the Munich conference on security, at the end of 2007. The head of the Kremlin denounces the American hegemony on the international order – the “world of a single master”. The following year, the Russian army amputated part of Georgia’s territory – an act of which the West did not measure the gravity. “After the Iraqi debacle and the crisis of subprime, Putin feels that American power is declining, says historian Françoise Thom. From this time, the head of the Kremlin seems to be preparing for a confrontation with the West. Russia is still weak, but hydrocarbon revenues allow it to undertake a vast modernization of the army, the completion of which was planned… in 2020. The Covid has just delayed its plans.
After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the immensely popular Putin became increasingly authoritarian. “Until that time, he was anxious to compromise with the main actors of the Russian elite, to spare their interests, observes researcher Nikolai Petrov, specialist in Russia at Chatham House, in London. Then he swung into a logic where it draws its legitimacy from the military system and no longer depends on the elites. Gradually, it took the big decisions on its own.” And the main political leaders have become executors. Thus, on October 11, 2015, when Vladimir Putin announced on television a military intervention in Syria, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was flabbergasted. “When someone handed him a piece of paper on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, he was amazed,” said a diplomat.
“He does not seek to convince or negotiate”
To establish his supremacy, the autocrat breaks the baronies. “Russia was like a federation of huge corporations, headed by influential leaders, like Vladimir Yakunin, the boss of the Russian railways. Putin replaced these powerful but loyal men – and who could advise him – , by young managers unable to say no to him”, continues Nikolai Petrov.
It’s the start of a spiral. Putin locks himself in his logic. “In the interviews I have attended, he absolutely does not give the feeling of listening, but repeats ad infinitum and ad nauseam, its narrative. He launches into long monologues on the history of eternal Russia, the aggressive attitude of the West… He seeks neither to convince nor to negotiate, but to impress, to make people understand that we don’t have no other choice than to accept his position”, recalls Jean-Maurice Ripert, ambassador to Moscow from 2013 to 2017. A “wall” which Emmanuel Macron is currently facing in his discussions with the head of the Kremlin.
When he headed the general directorate for external security, Bernard Bajolet went to Moscow several times to meet his counterparts from the FSB and the SVR (external secret services). During one of his last trips, the senior French official delivers a message to the attention of the head of the Kremlin. Without suspecting that these senior officers, in particular the head of the SVR Sergei Naryshkin, are terrorized by their leader. “I told them that I was impressed by the tactical talent of their boss, but that I did not understand his strategy, because they were being made vassal by China, says the former master spy. imagined that within the hour, Putin would be informed of our conversation. But I do not know if they were able to relay to him this kind of questioning of his strategy. It is unlikely, judging by the fear that could be read on the face of the same Naryshkin, during a meeting of the Russian Security Council, in the Kremlin, on February 21. Humiliated for having wanted to give “one last chance” to diplomacy, he is forced by Putin to affirm, stammering, that he is on the same line as his leader.
The master of the Kremlin is not only suspicious of his foreign interlocutors, almost all of whom are perceived as adversaries of the Russian nation. Even those around him struggle to speak to him. “He became radicalized,” said Hélène Blanc, CNRS researcher and author of several books on the Putin system. The Elysée Palace did not hesitate to evoke an “ideological drift” and a “paranoid discourse”, after its five-hour discussion with Emmanuel Macron, on February 7 in Moscow.
The pandemic, a turning point
The Covid-19 epidemic has made matters worse. Putin spent most of 2020 holed up in his presidential residence in Valdai, between Moscow and Saint Petersburg. All the leaders of the country, including those responsible for day-to-day management, had to submit to a long quarantine to meet him. “The number of people who could approach him has been considerably reduced and this has had major consequences. valuable information,” says Nikolai Petrov.
The fear of reporting negative information is growing among its employees. Which, combined with a glaring lack of expertise on Ukraine, may explain why the war is going less well than expected. “According to data collected by Moscow before the attack, the Ukrainians were unhappy with the action of their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and pessimistic about the future of the country. The Russians therefore thought that they would be welcomed with arms They did not perceive the Ukrainian patriotic feeling”, summarizes Marie Dumoulin, responsible for wider Europe at the European Center for International Relations.
So who can stop Putin? In any case, not the billionaires he has made prosper over the past twenty years: they know they will lose everything if the head of the Kremlin leaves power. Captured by his dream of resurrecting Greater Russia, convinced that the West is threatening him and without counterpower to curb him, Putin is dangerous as ever. How far will he go? Three weeks after the start of his offensive, no one knows. Because the Kremlin has become a black box. Among the possible scenarios, an attack by Moldova, including Transnistria, a pro-Russian enclave, has just declared itself independent. “Putin can also try to test the solidity of NATO by creating incidents with a Baltic country like Estonia or Latvia, which have large Russian minorities”, adds Marie Dumoulin.
The nationalist fringe of the intelligentsia wouldn’t mind it. “Have you noticed that our president always does what he says? […], wrote pro-Kremlin political scientist Vladimir Mojegov this month. Believe that the demand to bring NATO back to the 1991 borders is not a joke, it’s serious. The question is, “How do you get there?” The old rules are gone, the peace of Yalta is gone, the international security system is gone. The new world is made by the bold.”
To the point, some wonder, of sinking deeper into horror? “Putin has no choice: he must obtain concessions from the Ukrainian government to demonstrate that the war and all the sacrifices made have not been useless. My fear? It is that he will not obtain these concessions quickly and resort to more dangerous weapons, including mini-nuclear bombs, to terrify the world”, worries Nikolai Petrov. He is capable of it. At the KGB training center, had an examiner not noted that the young Putin was characterized by… a ” weak sense of danger”?