Chronic. There was a time when Russia, through the USSR, reigned over part of the world: the time of the Cold War, when two superpowers, the American and the Soviet, clashed to compete for influence . When the USSR collapsed in 1991, Russia presented itself as the logical heir to the attributes of its power. She kept the capital, Moscow, “city of heroes”, and the triumphal hymn. It recovered the nuclear warheads deployed in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, now independent. She settled into the permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.
Vladimir Putin has been leading this new Russia as an autocrat for twenty-two years. What has he done with this power? The record of this man who, by his own admission, aspires only to restore the “greatness” of the Soviet Union, is disastrous. There is no area in which he did not preside over the decline of his country. Apart from that of armaments, thanks to which he can afford the luxury of invading neighboring Ukraine today to enslave it, for lack of having succeeded in seducing it.
Russia, quipped a European leader in mid-February on the sidelines of the Munich security conference as tension mounted on the Ukrainian border, “It’s a gas station with nuclear missiles”. Hydrocarbons and military power: these are the two pillars on which Vladimir Putin was able to rely after succeeding Boris Yeltsin at the end of a decade of economic chaos. From hard power raw. At the beginning of his reign, he restored order and put the Russian economy back on track – while gradually closing the spaces of freedom opened up by Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
First episode in 2008
But the tide quickly turned. The impact of the global financial crisis of 2008 coincided with that of the first episode of Putin’s conquest, that of Georgia. The intervention in this ex-Soviet republic of the Caucasus revealed to Putin the poor state of its aviation and military equipment inherited from the USSR. It then committed a good part of its vast resources to the modernization of its armed forces. The momentum was launched: henceforth, the reconstitution of military power would take precedence over the rest.
The rest, in fact, have suffered seriously from this delusion of grandeur and the political logic that guided it. Freedom, economy, society, standard of living, innovation, culture… everything has been sacrificed. Vladimir Putin’s record at the head of Russia is nothing but a long descent into hell for a country which today finds itself plunged despite itself into a war against a people claimed as its own.
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