“Putin’s mistakes are the product of his ideological confinement”

For more than ten years, Michel Eltchaninoff has been dissecting the speeches of the Russian president. He drew from it a work translated into several languages, Inside the mind of Vladimir Putin (Actes Sud), published in 2015 and recently updated. This specialist in Russian thought, who is also editor-in-chief at magazine philosophyalso just published Lenin walked on the moon. The crazy story of Russian cosmists and transhumanists (Solin-Actes South). It analyzes the ideological motivations of the master of the Kremlin, who focused on the confrontation with the West.

L’Express: The talks at the beginning of the week showed that the Russians are blowing hot and cold, while continuing their strikes, in particular in Mariupol…

Michel Eltchaninoff: No wonder. The Kremlin has accustomed us to contradictory announcements in a short time, a known tactic to destabilize public opinion. It is also a sign of the extreme difficulty in interrupting the conflict. A ceasefire agreement will be very difficult to obtain. But the most important thing is the countdown, until May 9, the day of the celebration in the USSR of the “Great Patriotic War” and the victory over Nazism, a date in the history of re-sacralized Russia by Putin. However, he explains that Russian troops are trying to liberate Ukraine from neo-Nazis.

On May 9, on Red Square, there will be a military parade, he must present a victory. At a minimum, it would be to have taken over the Donbass within its administrative limits, with cities like Mariupol. Under these conditions, I am quite skeptical about a quick ceasefire agreement.

Can Putin agree to give up taking kyiv, which he makes the cradle of contemporary Russian civilization?

He has war aims that are embedded like Russian dolls. First the idea that we must prevent a genocide against Russian speakers in the Donbass, a region to be made safe. And then, eventually, bring it into the Russian Federation through referendums in the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. There is also the “denazification” of Ukraine. Which still means a change of power.

Putin’s speech for at least ten years claims that Kyiv is inseparably linked to Russian history and what he calls Russia’s spiritual identity. If the prospect of taking kyiv recedes, it will remain a goal in his ideological discourse. It can quite well proceed in stages, while waiting to act by other means, such as political destabilization. He may also be counting on tensions erupting between Zelensky and the population if concessions are agreed. Putin can spread out his strategic objectives all the more over time as he can stay in power until 2036.

The war is not going as Putin would have liked. What mistakes did he make?

There are the political mistakes he made in relation to the state of his forces, overestimated, the Ukrainian resistance on the ground and the Western reaction, underestimated. More fundamentally, there is his ideological confinement. He has always held two contradictory statements: on the one hand, the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples; on the other, the abduction of the Ukrainian people by a neo-Nazi power.

In his mind, the Ukrainians should have welcomed the Russian troops as liberators. He did not understand that the Ukrainians are no longer Russia’s little brothers and have formed themselves into a nation, in an accelerated way since the Maidan revolution of 2014. Worse: the Russian-speaking regions, his priority, we can be even more cruelly felt the invasion, due to their cultural and linguistic proximity. For a month now, their feeling of betrayal has been even stronger towards Russia, because their inhabitants imagined even less than western Ukrainians that the invasion order would be so massive and so would the Russian army brutal.

Another error, is it not to have believed that the Europeans could not unite?

Here again, there is a form of blindness linked to the discourse he has deployed for fifteen years on the anthropological weakness of Europeans, attached to material comfort, incapable of sacrificing themselves for a great cause. And who do not have this vital force, this idealistic commitment that the Russians have. Perhaps he was convinced, over the years, of their lack of unity through the effects of his policy of influence, seeing also the divisions that existed between the populist parties and those of government, the tensions social, the migrant crisis.

Did the conduct of the Kabul evacuation also play a role?

This event has undoubtedly finished convincing Putin and the hawks of his entourage that the Americans would not intervene in a massive way. The Russian press saw a wave of weakness there, with Americans humiliated by the Taliban, unable to protect the Europeans and other nations engaged in Afghanistan. But they were wrong. As always, ideology is mistaken about reality.

More broadly, isn’t Putin’s mistake to think of democracies as weak by nature?

He is a great reader of Ivan Ilyne, a conservative philosopher from the beginning of the 20th century who tried to think about post-communism. Putin said again last October that he was his bedside author. Ilyne deploys a critique of what he calls formal democracy, based on the rule of law and which presupposes a rapid alternation of representatives.

Since the 2000s, Putin has been convinced of the weakness of this model. There is the desire to replace it with another, which I call “democracy of acclamation”, a power based on the enthusiasm felt by the people in the face of the strength, the tenacity of their guide, who is systematically reelected and which carries a great civilizational project. Except that the rules of democracy are no longer respected: an absence of adversarial debate, election fraud, justice under orders and opposition parties that no longer have the right to exist.

For Putin to hand over seems inconceivable: why is power so vital to him?

First very concrete reason: he and his entourage looted the country. The great ideological declamations aimed at Russians or Western companies also aim to hide this large-scale corruption, documented by Navalny’s teams. Putin’s palace is not a fiction, nor the enrichment of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and the other members of Russian power.

There is a concern that one day we will have to answer to justice for stolen public money. The ideological justification for keeping Putin in power, and this can be seen with the war in Ukraine, is his desire to write a new page in the history of his country, which he has been preparing for years for an ideological confrontation with the ‘West. He wants to be the equal of the great Russian leaders and emperors and wishes to remain as the one who allowed his country to regain the rank it deserves. He may also have the desire to create a Putinian Russia, with a Putinism that could survive him as an ideology differentiated from that of liberal democracies.

Stalinism did not survive Stalin…

Of course, but the violence exerted on society was on a different scale. And Putinism is a man, difficult to know if it will survive its author, as the idea of ​​incarnation is consubstantial with this ideology. His bet was to convince his contemporaries that the future of Russia must be made in confrontation with the West more than in cooperation.

Putin’s postures have seduced certain European leaders, such as Viktor Orban, the Hungarian Prime Minister: why?

Orban fits in with one of Putin’s ideological lines: the conservatism that has been promoted since 2012. Putinism has reached minds and peoples all over the world, with motives such as anti-imperialism – which appeals to the extreme left – the cult of the leader or the great man, the idea of ​​a very strong conservatism – which attracts part of the traditional right.

In the case of France, representatives of very different movements can show a certain indulgence vis-à-vis Putin, from Mélenchon to the extreme right. Putin has succeeded in embodying forms of discontent, of fascination, which come together in his face. And as he has been there for twenty-two years, he embodies a form of stability in the fantasies to which he may be subjected. From this point of view, he succeeded, unfortunately.