Grandstand. In his speech celebrating the annexation of Crimea on March 18, 2014, Vladimir Putin said: “In sum, we have every reason to believe that the famous policy of containment of Russia, which was carried out in the XVIIIandXIXand and XXand centuries, continues today. » Far from being isolated, this perception of history and of the world is widely shared among Russian politico-military elites. The latter were convinced that the Soviet Union had been defeated after the Cold War, during an indirect conflict conceived and orchestrated by Washington to destroy the country.
Armed with this belief, Russian strategists from the early 1990s theorized the circumvention of interstate armed struggle as a means of achieving Moscow’s political and strategic objectives. This long reflection bore fruit when the Russian Chief of the General Staff, Valéri Guerassimov, exposed, in 2013, the considerable importance taken by non-military means (notably informational, cybernetic, economic and diplomatic) and indirect military (special and paramilitary forces, or demonstrations of force) in interstate confrontation. If Moscow has implemented this indirect strategy almost everywhere in the world, from Europe to Africa via the “near abroad”, Ukraine has been, since 2004, and more directly since 2014, a real laboratory of all that indirect strategy can count in instruments of influence, pressure and action below the threshold of interstate armed struggle.
Worried worldview
However, on February 24, Vladimir Putin launched an open war against Ukraine. Several factors pushed him to take this decision which represents, only in appearance, a strategic break. If Russian strategists have until now favored circumventing the inter-state armed struggle to achieve the objectives of the state, they have neither ruled out the possibility of implementing it nor abandoned its conceptualization. It would therefore be more accurate to speak of“extreme option” than a strategic break.
To understand this extreme choice of the Russian president, it is necessary to take into account the representation that the Russian politico-military elites have of the strategic environment. This vision is first traversed by central beliefs: the world is hostile to Russia on the one hand, and the United States is omniscient and omnipotent on the other. It is also marked by a specific way of thinking: both a relative negation of the autonomy of the individual and spontaneous collective wills and a difficulty in conceiving that events can be the result of chance, and not necessarily of a manipulation.
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