Chronic. Vladimir Putin loves Ukraine, the “cradle of Russian civilisation”, so much that he has set out to destroy it. Ukrainians didn’t greet the Russian army with flowers? They are going to pay – in devastated cities, cohorts of refugees, thousands of dead and maimed, thousands of orphans too. Why ? To what end? Three weeks after the start of the Russian aggression, the character Putin remains central to understanding “his” war. Elements of psycho-political portrait.
Explanation by despotism: locked in his bubble of lies, the autocrat, convinced of his intellectual superiority, only listens to his fantasies. He will be the tsar of modern times, the one who goes “to restore Russia to its historical integrity”. This is the Putin described by the official agency Novosti in an article celebrating a little hastily, at the end of February, the conquest of Ukraine by Russian troops – the article has since been removed. The excellent Russian diplomats and spies have surely issued warnings to the Kremlin: Ukraine is not what the president believes; the Ukrainians will resist. But installed in his “alternative reality”, Putin neither hears nor reads them and launches “his” war.
Explanation by “humiliation”. Since the end of the USSR, Westerners have ” abandoned “ then didn’t stop “to humiliate” Russia, says the historian Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, permanent secretary of the French Academy. In his warrior madness, President Putin would be the child of this environment: a wounded emotional. Let’s take a closer look. Under pressure from the United States, Russia entered the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in 1992: it obtained tens of billions of dollars in continuous loans in the years that followed. She joined the Council of Europe in 1996, then the G7 in 1997 (which became G8), recalls BFM-TV journalist Frédéric Bianchi.
Official thesis
Moscow benefits from support from Washington during the ruble crisis in 1998 and from emergency financial assistance from Brussels. Not to mention the Russia-NATO partnership established, at least formally, in 1991. Offensive treatment? Contempt and arrogance, there was, of course – especially on the part of the United States during the Balkan wars. But the balance does not lean on the side of humiliation.
The explanation by the extension of NATO, the defensive alliance created during the Cold War and which binds the United States to Europe. This is the official thesis heard in Moscow, but also elsewhere. A wise and far-sighted strategist, Putin gets his hands on Ukraine because it could one day join NATO and, strong in this membership, set off to reconquer Crimea and Donbass (two Ukrainian regions that Moscow has controlled since 2014 ). If NATO admitted in 2008 that kyiv had a vocation to join it, the Alliance still refuses to open the membership procedure.
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