The regular Russian army therefore went on the attack. Vladimir Putin no longer hides behind the separatists. The Ukrainian border was shattered at the same time as the Minsk agreements. Certainly these had not been applied but it appears that the master of the Kremlin saw much further than the Donbass. Here he is launched into a tragic operation which he imagines as a preventive measure against joining NATO. A Blitzkrieg with still vague contours and which risks a deadly stalemate. A madness with terrible consequences for both countries. Because no offense to Putin, Ukraine is indeed a sovereign state. A state that has carved out a place for itself on the political map of Europe quite recently? So what ? A nation can very well hatch, assert itself, seduce.
Putin represents quite the opposite. If he resorts to military action, it is because his Russia today offers neither prospects nor freedoms. She is hardly attractive. The sanctions that the world imposes on it a little more each day will not help matters and its population will pay the price. But this is another story. Let us stick for the moment to this suffering Ukraine.
A Russophony does not bode feelings and identity
Is this the conclusion or the umpteenth episode of this conflict that started in 2014, in reaction to the so-called Maidan revolution? At the time, I was the director of the Alliance française in a city of Donetsk, waiting for sometimes divisive slogans. Putin had got his hands on a Crimea that was favorable to him by surprise. In Donbass the thing was already more nuanced and the fighting there never stopped. Kiev has its share of responsibility in the misfortune of the civilians of this gigantic mining basin inherited from the USSR.
But beyond these self-proclaimed republics, Ukraine should only show itself to be deeply hostile to Moscow. The Kremlin is a poor analyst. Even widespread Russophony in no way portends feelings and identity. This language is spoken in many countries of Eurasia. She lives there, she writes to herself, she sings to herself and it is not a cry for help. I remember a student who said to me: “I don’t recognize myself in Dostoyevsky”. We can also estimate that the sorting of “pro-Russians” took place over these years. Those who wanted to be attached to Moscow stayed in Donbass or joined Russia. I saw the others scattered throughout the rest of Ukraine and even abroad. Young people in particular, too often angry with loved ones nostalgic for a bygone Union.
It is not defending one’s homeland to invade another.
Here they are for many now called up for military service. Opposite, guys from the Volga, Siberia, the Arctic, all the faces I’ve come across in my travels in Russia. These soldiers are sent to fight the “brother” country on its lands and as far away as Kiev. We bet that most of them had not signed up for this kind of mission. It is not defending one’s homeland to invade another. I want to believe that it is the disastrous error of a power whose verticality has become abyssal.
Thousands of Russians had the courage to express their opposition and their sadness in the streets of Saint Petersburg or Moscow. Many others are under the influence of propaganda broken by too few press titles. The game is also played on this side. It is mind-boggling to hear the president of such a powerful country swallowing down his compatriots an alleged “denazification”. This “liberation” will have no other consequence than to reinforce a formerly indolent identity. Ukraine today forms a body and arouses as much empathy as admiration. It was not Lenin who created the Ukraine, it was Putin.
Blood flows. Spirits are struck. The human toll will be disastrous. This is not how one settles one’s resentment vis-à-vis an America with unfortunate precedents. Not by imitating him. You can hear that Russia in some respects feels humiliation. But whatever happens to this blitzkrieg that has already lasted too long, it will not come out of it unscathed or improved. That’s an understatement. She lost in a few hours years of post-Soviet recovery. Let her mourn this myth of a border on the Dnieper where God knows where in the middle of Ukraine. May it mourn its imperial and Stalinist past in order to better rebuild itself, may it finally turn the page!
Cedric Gras, a great specialist in the Russian Far East, led several Alliances Françaises in Ukraine from 2011 to 2015. A writer, he is the author of Winter on the trail and Stalin’s Mountaineerspublished by Stock.