The weekly chronicle of Gilles Martin-Chauffier.
Until last week, we looked at images of Kiev and we felt at home, in good old civilized Christian land. Cathedrals with gilded bulbs and grandiose official buildings, pedestrian squares and statues, pretty parks and wide avenues, Peugeot and Volkswagen traffic, blonde grandmas and mothers, kékés with tattoos and civil servants in black briefcases, everything read like a postcard of potential holidays: “Perfect stay. Everything is fine. The inhabitants were like distant neighbours, perhaps living at the other end of the district but taking the same metro. We imagined their routine: flat screens in the living room, Netflix series, Picard frozen foods and grim suburbs. With the fashionable concerns: the thickness of the ozone layer which is decreasing, the sea level which is rising, the LGBT people who are moaning… And then the Kremlin was invited to the show. Leaning for ages on the parapet of peaceful democracy, we have not paid much attention to it. Whether Ukraine joined NATO or remained neutral did not bother anyone. One does not die of being Finnishized. Anyway, perched on the stilts of the whole of Europe, Emmanuel Macron was going to settle the question. And quick ! The election campaign was just waiting for him. Except that the problem was Vladimir Putin himself.
For twenty years, we begin to know him. His empty and icy gaze lands on you like a beam from a watchtower. We quickly guess that under its rough bark hides a heart of stone! The most maddening thing is when he appears surrounded by his Security Council, a band of inflexible, impassive and irremovable marshals. In the cyclopean salons with the whiteness of the psychiatric hospital of the Kremlin, their appearance of potbellied, paunchy and maffluent maffiosi give the air of a determination to bring down the walls. Negotiating with them without an army behind you is like opening an oyster without a knife. It’s like describing the rainbow to a blind man. Or ask a dog to meow. If we hope that they give your complaints a moment, it is better to disguise themselves as a mirror and send them an image as determined as theirs. As one does not stop the wind with the hands, the hopes of peaceful settlement of the French president and the Europeans fell with the brutality of a door which slams. It’s always the same: you never know the thirst with which the other drinks. And there, Putin had a very dry throat.
Helplessness, resignation and affliction have become the Holy Trinity of our commitments
Any wall being good for a climbing plant, he seized the first pretext that came along and, now his fable of Nazis at the helm in Ukraine, he started the war. And a real one! With quantities of victims, bombings, destruction… In a country where, eight days earlier, we were going on vacation! As a good contemptuous autocrat, he must have told himself that, as usual, he was going to be bombarded with hollow words filled with emotion. Despots always hear a volcano rumble when they strike a match. Luckily for us, however, he seems to have skimmed Machiavelli and Clausewitz. And to have misunderstood Volodymyr Zelensky’s manly curves. Ukraine is big. Even more than France. And very populated: 44 million inhabitants. It is not with 200,000 men that one holds such a gigantic hostile territory. Sending his troops to rush to the goal and harvest the heads, he forgot the hedges on the track. However, without a finish line, sprinters tire quickly. Result: the hostilities are likely to last and deliver an unbearable spectacle. We promise the intervention of Chechen brigades! Understood: doors open to barbarism. Even if there are just wars, there are no just armies. And we will only have one role: that of a public reduced to scratching the whites of our eyes. With, in the role of victims, women, children, old ladies…
Read also. “How many children still have to die?” : The anger of Olena Zelenska, the wife of Volodymyr Zelensky
Unthinkable but true: despite a history as long as the Nile, the French only have the look of an unarmed drone. Powerlessness, resignation and affliction have become the Holy Trinity of our commitments. To continue to give lessons to the whole world, we want adventure without mosquitoes, the black run without fractures and victories without deaths. Well, there the locomotive hit the bumpers. For days, we have been glued to our screens, helpless. How else could it be, anyway? Deterrence goes from weak to strong. But from weak to crazy? Our existence is therefore reduced to a frustrating theater. Luckily, for once, the woof-woof party that laughs at everything is holding back. Rest assured: he will recover quickly. As soon as our diplomats explain to us that they have restored peace. Because that, you can be sure, we will not escape it.
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