The invasion of February 24, 2022, the absolute disrespect of international law, the collective denial of the Russian people and the terrible abuses committed on Ukrainian soil raise many questions about the moral state of Russia. How could the country of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy sink to such an extent into violence and total denial of reality? A specialist in Russia, the director of the Russia/NIS Center at the French Institute of International Relations gives us her analysis here. To understand the Russian soul today, she says, you have to change focus: what we perceive as a moral breakdown on the diplomatic, cultural or religious level, the majority of Russians see instead as a strength.
For several weeks, the Kremlin’s communication has been more realistic, Vladimir Putin has even hinted to the Russians that the war is difficult and that it will be long. What does this inflection reveal?
Tatiana Kastoueva-Jean More than an evolution towards more truth and transparency, it is an adjustment to reality and to the context which has changed a great deal. Since the destruction of the flagship Moscow, last April, the Russian army suffered a series of serious setbacks which end up raising the question of its ability to win this war, but also of its aims. A communication too out of step with reality would cause the credibility of the military and political authorities to collapse.
Let us take the example of the bombardment of Makiivka, on December 31 last. The mobilized were all from the same region. These deaths are therefore more “visible” than elsewhere. Their loved ones can organize themselves more easily to hold the authorities accountable. The authorities therefore anticipated by communicating upstream, while reducing the number of deaths and putting the blame on the backs of the mobilized, accused of having used their mobile phones.
Revealing even a part of the human losses also makes it possible to underline the harsh and lasting nature of the conflict, which prepares public opinion for a subsequent mobilization and justifies repressive action against the Ukrainians. It’s probably a pawn the Kremlin will need later in its macabre game.
Since the retreat from Kherson, the front has stabilized, the Russians have even recaptured the albeit modest locality of Solar. Have the Russians learned from their mistakes?
Since the beginning of the war, the military capabilities of the Ukrainians and the resolve of the West to support them have been reassessed upwards by the Russians. But that does not mean that all the problems have been solved. The persistence of some obsolete mental patterns and the strategic culture dating from another century, the quarrels between the army, the special services and the private militias of Prigojine suggest that there will undoubtedly still be blunders and disastrous decisions. . Especially since Putin wants victory whatever the cost.
How long do you think this war can last?
A priori, Putin is moving towards a lasting war that aims to exhaust the adversary. Last December, he used the expression “A hen pecks the grains one by one”. He will continue to play on several levels to exhaust the means and crush the will of resistance of the Ukrainians, but also to intimidate the West, as evidenced by the demonstration of the Zircon supersonic missiles, launched from a warship, on January 4. He still thinks that Russian victory is possible, that Russia is more resilient and tenacious over time, and that a nuclear power cannot lose a war against a conventional adversary.
Rumors of new mobilization raise fears of the arrival on the front of hundreds of thousands of Russians. One can’t help but think of the waves of Red Army soldiers crashing into the German defenses at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942, until they finally gave way… Does life matter? it as little for Putin as for Stalin?
What is certain is that neither economic reasons (deterioration in the standard of living of Russians) nor human reasons (high losses among Russian soldiers) weigh in on Putin’s decisions. It is indeed in two dimensions: immediate, because it plays its political survival, and probably physical, as well as the survival of its system, and historical. Didn’t he affirm, in his Christmas greetings, that historical and moral justice is on the Russian side? I think he may be tempted by a new mobilization, especially since he had validated in principle the recent proposal by his Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, to increase the number of Russian army personnel to 1 .5 million people. He still hasn’t canceled his oukase on the mobilization of last September and the age to be mobilized has been raised to 30 years. At the same time, the army has not yet “digested” the previous wave of mobilized! Before taking the social risk of a new wave, there are other options: a “creeping” and selective mobilization, attraction through remuneration or even the mobilization of Ukrainians living in the newly annexed regions.
I think Putin would like to revive the spirit of the Great Patriotic War and the defense of Russian lands – he spoke in his New Year’s Day greetings of defending “our” citizens in “our historical territory” – against the West, but his argument from the beginning is so confused, changing and catchall and his strategy has suffered so many failures that even the Russians who support the “special military operation” against the “Ukrainian Nazis” do not resume not his speech.
Do you think that we have been witnessing, for several years, a “moral collapse” of Russia?
It is in a very different mirror that the Russians look at themselves! For them, on the contrary, it is the decadent old Western world which clings to the remnants of its domination while Russia embodies fidelity to Christian principles and traditional values while defending its national specificity. Since the beginning of the war, there has been a rising discourse on the superiority of the Russian people, courageous, devoted to the defense of the fatherland, ready to die to defend their sovereignty without yielding to the American steamroller. Discussion of values is impossible today. Immediately, the examples of the duplicity of Westerners and their sins since the dawn of time are listed, from colonialism to the military operation in Iraq and Libya. “No lesson to take from lying and cynical Westerners”; “Western values are not universal and do not suit us”; “the victorious people of Nazism can only embody good”: these are the pillars of Russian moral posture today.
Seen from the West, we are frightened by what the war in Ukraine reveals to us about Russians: the propensity for violence, the degree of blindness to propaganda, the adherence to hate speech, the incitement to genocide , the low value of human life and the rights of the individual, the instrumentalization of the Orthodox Church, the acceptance of the arbitrariness of the State or even the incapacity for empathy and collective action. You must read Z as Zombie by Iegor Gran, which is based on facts related in the public space. What we can see as a moral collapse on the diplomatic, cultural or religious level, the majority of Russians see it on the contrary as a strength, as an ability to mobilize everything in the name of a national cause.
Whence the cynicism, the willful blindness of part of the Russian population ?
A real polarization of society is taking place. It partly follows the generational divide, but only partly. Long-running propaganda plays a big part, as well as facility, conformism and social apathy. But propaganda is the rain that waters the fertile soil, which is made up of several ingredients, the main one being the absence of any critical reflection on the Soviet and imperial past, on Russia’s relations with neighboring countries, considered near and known – and inferior, by definition. It is also the failure of the economic, political and social modernization of Russia, of which Moscow is only a sparkling and deceptive showcase. To this must be added the absence of a democratic culture of which Russia has a disfigured image by the 1990s and a perverted understanding of human rights through the prism of the rights of minorities, sexual and otherwise. As a result, the self-valorization of the Russians passes through the glorification of the past, the defense of traditional values and a balance of power, even a violent opposition with the Western world.