If, despite the failure of his initial offensive, Vladimir Putin chose to persevere in his aggression, it is because he does not believe in the will and the capacity of Western democracies to support a conflict in a joint, coherent manner. and prolonged. This is because they are far too talkative, and for fear of their public opinion, they persist in proclaiming what they are going to do – and worse still, what they are not going to do. They very officially announce what they can deliver to Ukraine and within what time frame, what they are unable to deliver, and even the state of their own stocks of weapons and ammunition. Their strategic and political disagreements also appear in the public arena, considerably facilitating the Kremlin’s work.
For a former KGB officer raised in a culture of secrecy, this is not a serious way to behave in war. Moreover, the very word war seems to frighten Western heads of state, elected for four or five years, subject to all the whims of their public opinions, harassed by opponents eager to replace them, excessively influenced by electoral considerations. in the short term and subject to the dictates of a Brussels bureaucracy wide open to lobbies of all origins – Russian and Chinese included.
There are naturally a few other reasons why Putin does not take seriously those Westerners who persist in wanting to reap the “peace dividend”: they become afraid as soon as Russian propaganda mentions red lines or brandishes the nuclear threat, they witness without reacting to sabotage in their arms factories, they let legal quibbles get in the way of using frozen Russian assets to help the Ukrainian war effort, their counter-propaganda effort is derisory and they are highly vulnerable to pacifist, Islamist, anti-Semitic, anti-capitalist, anti-racist and anti-state demonstrations that the FSB and GRU agitators are able to instigate or encourage with an absolute minimum of effort…
Contempt for France
If Vladimir Putin does not fear Germany afflicted with a pacifist chancellor, a shaky coalition, venal businessmen and Russian agents at every level, he despises even more a France whose president seems to entangled in its whims and reversals, while being paralyzed by highly politicized unions, inquisitive judges, recalcitrant civil servants, a freewheeling constitutional court, an above-ground European court of justice, crazy ecologists, Islamo- virulent leftists, uninhibited anarchists, hostile media, militant NGOs, uncontrolled social networks, uncontrollable delinquents, aggressive or victimizing minorities and a chronically dissatisfied people.
And then, how can we take seriously a country which can be completely paralyzed in 48 hours by the sole decision of a communist union – with the approval of a significant part of the French people?
Europe also has a certain number of political figures openly subservient to Russian power, and the United States is irremediably divided between Democrats and Republicans, Blacks and Whites, extremists of all stripes and easily manipulated public opinion – with the tempting prospect of see Donald Trump return to power at the end of the year – Vladimir Putin is almost certain to win in this Ukrainian affair. He must say, exactly like Hitler in 1938: “All I have before me are worthless people!”
With this confidence, he will undoubtedly make the same mistakes as the Führer, forgetting that defeat is often implicit in the most brilliant victories; even if Russia ended up winning in Ukraine, it would only more surely ensure its loss: after the Second World War, the Ukrainians resisted the Soviet occupier for more than ten years; today, they would lead a much more ferocious guerrilla war, on the smoking ruins of a country that the Russians would exhaust themselves to rebuild… And all this against a backdrop of clan struggles in the Kremlin, of growing agitation among the thirty million of Muslims in the country and Chinese ambitions that are quite worrying for the future of Siberia. This is how Putin will fly from victory to victory until the final disaster…
*François Kersaudy is a historian. Latest book published: Ten hidden faces of communism (Perrin).
.