Chronic. At least things are clear. In turn, the Austrian Chancellor, Karl Nehammer, made the trip to Moscow on Monday, April 11, in the hope that, representing a non-NATO member country, he could pull something off, a ceasefire , a concession perhaps, to Vladimir Putin in his war against Ukraine. He also broke his teeth. That “was not a friendly visit”, he recognized on the way back. This interview, ” hard “with a Russian president “massively imbued with a logic of war” made it rather pessimistic.
There is something. The war crimes committed by the Russian army in the vicinity of kyiv marked a turning point. Even President Emmanuel Macron, adept at maintaining the thread of dialogue with Mr. Putin against all odds, has not spoken to him since March 29. But above all, seven weeks after its outbreak, the Russian war in Ukraine has entered a new military, ideological and geopolitical phase. And Act II of this European drama promises to be even harder.
New military phase
After the failure of the initial scenario of the flash operation, which aimed to overthrow power in kyiv and take control of the country, Moscow changed its strategy. The Russian forces which were to take kyiv, defeated by the Ukrainian resistance, fell back. The Kremlin wants to avoid getting bogged down in guerrilla warfare on a territory that is too vast and rebellious.
The action is now concentrated in the East and the South-East, closer to the bases in Russia. Pounded for weeks, Mariupol is about to fall. The Russian army is preparing an offensive on the whole of Donbass; it will face the most seasoned and best equipped Ukrainian troops there. Vladimir Putin, explain his supporters in Moscow, needs a victory for his parade on May 9, a traditionally grandiose celebration of the victory of the “great patriotic war”: a Ukrainian trophy of “special military operation” would come at the right time. On Tuesday, the Russian president considered that the negotiations with Ukraine were “at an impasse”; “The operation will therefore be completed”.
New ideological phase
From Moscow in recent weeks have come increasingly fiery texts and interviews on the reasons for the Russian operation. We unearth a premonitory book from 2006, The Third Empire. Russia as it should be (not translated), written by Mikhail Yuriev, former Duma deputy speaker who died in 2019, which describes with astonishing precision the war in Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014, then the current invasion of Ukraine. the book, note those who have read and commented on itis a model of “post-Soviet medievalism, an anti-Western and anti-democratic ideology that assigns the ‘Russian Orthodox civilization’ a dominant role over Europe and the United States”.
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