First of all, I would like to apologize for my long absence (I haven't published anything for two months). The cause of it is a long illness (I first got the flu, like many people nowadays, but then this flu turned into pneumonia and so I was unable to work all this time ). I'm now recovered and I'm back to work. Many in-depth articles await you because if I have not written anything during these weeks, I have thought a lot. 🙂
It is impossible to begin the study of an assessment of Putin's political work without first mentioning the army and the war. I intend to look into the political and international consequences of this War in other articles so I will focus in the next articles on the purely tactical and strategic levels. Nor will there be any question here of the justification of this war or of the crimes that were committed during it.
Here what will interest us is how in a few months, Putin succeeded in destroying the supposed second best army in the world. That is to say to what extent the President's incompetence has led Russia to lose one of its major assets and one of the pillars of its foreign policy, while receiving a forever tarnished reputation. Because it must be understood that, in 2022, Putin's record is above all the military humiliation of Russia. And this humiliation begins with the vagueness of its objectives.
Course of the War
For months Peskov (Kremlin spokesman) has been telling us ad nauseam “The Special Military Operation is proceeding according to the schedule and the plan determined from the outset, all objectives will be achieved.” So it must be understood that the conquest and then the abandonment of Kherson was part of the plan, the destruction of the standard-bearer Moskva too, and the destruction of Russian equipment followed by a mobilization were just as much part of the scheme. Apparently Putin's plan in February 2022 was “We will lose, then withdraw from Kyiv, then lose and withdraw from the Black Sea, then lose and send mobilized troops to the front before withdrawing again!”. If that was the plan, then yes, Peskov is right, everything is going according to plan!
But let's take a closer look at some interesting details.
First, the objectives of the operation were never clearly formulated and always changed according to the political or military situation of the moment (this is called improvisation!). Thus the objectives were first the “denazification” of Ukraine, the disarmament of Ukraine, the halting of NATO’s progress towards Russia and the “liberation” of Donbass. Let's talk about it a bit...
Liberation of Donbass
I will evacuate this question in a few lines, because this subject has no interest. In a few words: you do not liberate a territory by annexing it. And first to free it from whom and why? How can you claim to have liberated a territory if it lives under a more violent repression than the one taking place in Belarus and Russia and where everything is desolation, corruption, theft and criminality? Before 2014 Donbass was one of the most prosperous and developed regions of Ukraine. Since 2014 it has been a land of suffering and poverty. If the Donbass should free itself from something, it is obviously from the “benefits” of the “Russian peace”. To die in Bakhmut for the Russian army or for the militias of Donbass is today one of the most meaningless acts one can do. Dying to allow the suffering of one's people to continue is an unnamed paradox. The only things Donbass is liberated from today are happiness and hope.
Denazification
“Denazification”? This term refers to the process led by the United Nations in Germany after 1945 and more specifically: the creation of new states based on democratic principles (obviously according to the interpretation of the term by the Western or Soviet authorities) and the purging of Nazi elements from German society (courts, imprisonment, etc…). This process went through the Nuremberg Tribunal for high Nazi dignitaries and local courts for all other regime officials. We therefore understand that it is a question of regime change.
“Denazifying Ukraine”? This concept makes no sense. Because Ukraine is a democratic state with a President elected by universal suffrage (and Zelensky happens to be of Jewish origin), a Government responsible in front of a Parliament, itself elected by the people directly. If there are neo-Nazi movements in Ukraine, we must not forget that there are all over the world, including in Russia (and by the way mathematically there are more neo-Nazis in Russia than in Ukraine because the population is larger). Under no circumstances can Ukraine be considered “Nazi” because there are sympathizers of this ideology on its territory. This is nonsense. There are communists in France, should we deduce then that France is communist and must be “decommunized” by way of military invasion? And if there is a need to “denazify” the world, why not start by “denazifying Russia” first?
Admittedly, Russian propaganda seeks to make the Russian people believe that the Ukrainians are Nazis by definition. Their argument is that during World War II there were Ukrainians who joined the armies of the Third Reich to become independent from the USSR and historic Russia. But we must immediately make things clear, those Ukrainians were not Nazis! They collaborated with the Nazis because their interests coincided at that precise moment! Working with someone does not make you that someone. Otherwise the USSR would be liberal because it benefited from the American Lend-Lease between 1941 and 1945 because it needed American help to fight the Germans! Moreover, let us never forget that there were enormously more Ukrainians who fought against Nazi barbarism in the Red Army than Ukrainians who fought in the armies of the Third Reich! And it goes without saying that we must not forget that there were Russians who fought for the Third Reich too! Does that make Russians Nazis because Vlassov fought for Hitler?
At this point Russian propaganda turns around and tells us that Ukrainians are Nazis because they are “anti-Russian”. First, being anti-Russian does not mean “Nazi”. It's just stupid. It's a shortcut invented by Stalin to tell the people that we must fight the fascist enemy because "fascist" means "anti-Russian". Thus the Russians cannot be fascist since they cannot be “anti-Russian” and if they oppose the will of the leader they are by definition fascist (while blindly following the leader is precisely a fascist characteristic …). We find here this purely Orwellian mechanism where we never call things by their name to create this cognitive dissonance capable of extinguishing consciences and facilitating the work of propaganda. Please I need a headache pill because we are swimming in madness ...
But back to our supposedly anti-Russian Ukrainians. The Ukrainians have never been anti-Russian (at least not until 2022)! Since 1991, the Ukrainians have been independent (and by the way they have become independent from the USSR which no longer exists and of which they were a part and were a founding member and not from Russia which was also part of it on an equal footing). Before 1991 they were not more anti-Russian because they wanted to be independent! It is still incredible for a country that claims to "Defend the Sovereignty of States against Western and American diktat" to consider the use of its sovereignty by Ukraine as anti-Russian and a good reason to crush this sovereignty in blood. The Ukrainians want to be masters of their own destiny. That's all. And the Putin regime sees this as a threat not because Ukraine risks being a danger to Russia as a nation or state or people. The independence of Ukraine is a clear and direct danger for the maintenance of Putin in power! Ukraine represents a free people who have managed to get rid of their chains and have therefore shown the example to Russians and Belarusians. The seeds of the future Russian Revolution come from the Euromaidan of 2014! That's why Putin hates Ukraine so much and seeks to destroy it! That's why he has for the past two decades sought to convince the Russian people that in Ukraine there is an enemy that seeks to kill it and that it is a Nazi people. To prevent the Ukrainian from being seen as a possible democratic ally, he had to be presented as the natural enemy. It's that simple. And the tragedy is that it worked! Convinced that they must defend their homeland from the Nazi aggressor, the Russian people took the bait without thinking...
So what is this “denazification” so wanted by Putin? It is quite simply the desire to change the Government of Kyiv in order to make Ukraine subject to the Russian will and to crush its sovereignty and its independence which made it drift towards more freedom… Potentially giving ideas to the Russians themselves ...
Result ?
After having promised loud and clear that if Ukraine did not capitulate it would risk its independence as a sovereign state, the Kremlin tells us today without blinking “Our objective is not regime change in Ukraine”. lWell let me laugh for a second… 😂😂😂 How can we still take Kremlin statements seriously after that? The real answer was actually “We tried to change the regime in Ukraine by force, but we couldn't, so we don't even try anymore.” But everything is going according to the schedule and the plan laid out in advance of course. Move around there is nothing to see here ...
The operation is therefore a failure on its first objective since the first days of the War! Russia, “second army in the world”, was not able to take Kyiv and arrest its government to replace it with a government more favorable to the Kremlin. This is already fantastic! As a reminder, the USSR had succeeded in this field in Afghanistan, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, etc. But Putin was not able to do so...
This is also why he started his illegal annexations… For years he said that Russia only needed Crimea, that the rest did not interest him and were not part of his plans. Until September there was no question of annexing the conquered territories! It was only after realizing that conquest was no longer possible for him that Putin decided to “consolidate” his hold on the territories conquered at the start of the War. The question was “since he did not achieve any victory and did not achieve any goal, how can he justify the human, material and economic losses to the Russian people now?”. By annexation of course… It is therefore an admission of failure.
Disarmament of Ukraine
According to Putin, since 2014, Ukraine has armed itself so that it can one day serve as the spearhead of a collective western attack on Russia. As the propaganda still repeats today, the West is using Ukraine to destroy Russia indirectly, without having to do it itself.
First let's put things back together.
After the deployment in the Donbass of the “little green men” (Russian soldiers without insignia and with a ban on communicating so that no one could make the connection between their deployment and Russian politics) what exactly was Ukraine to do? Lie down and do nothing? A foreign State deploys armed forces (admittedly covering itself with an alibi by saying that it is not him but just “little green men”) on your territory, what do you do in the first place? You will of course strengthen your defense potential! It's obvious. You have to be able to defend your country and carry out an operation to restore constitutional order in the secessionist territories (the Donbass precisely). And you have to reinforce your army all the more quickly if it comes to mind for this foreign State to invade you directly!
The West of course helped the Ukrainians by training them and providing them with equipment so that Ukraine could defend itself (and thus prevent a potential Russian expansion westward). But the West always dragged its feet because it did not want to provoke Russia. It was out of the question until February 2022 to supply a whole class of heavy weapons to Ukraine because they would be seen as a provocation by Moscow.
Result ? When the invasion began, Ukraine was short of equipment and ammunition… What a strange danger for Russia does this country constitute when it is not equipped to attack it … Besides, the idea of invading Russia by Ukraine is absurd in itself. No one has ever succeeded in invading Russia (the spaces to cover are too big, the material and weather conditions are horrible, and Russia's nuclear arsenal largely deters any country from attempting such madness).
Ukraine therefore presented no danger to Russia and there was no need to disarm it.
But Putin managed to create a paradoxical situation in just 10 months. Because Ukraine is now very well equipped. By having succeeded in stopping the Russian offensive (stupidly led by its generals), Ukraine has bought time. And that time was used to equip it in a big way. It was therefore in reaction to the Russian invasion that the West decided to change its policy and really help Ukraine to arm itself. Putin is therefore the direct author not of the “disarmament” of Ukraine but on the contrary of its massive armament. If the West did not want to provoke Russia, the invasion of Ukraine has now untied its hands. The West certainly still respects a few red lines to avoid an uncontrolled escalation of the conflict, but it must be recognized, what a resounding failure! Putin created by his stupidity the danger on the borders of Russia which he claimed to be fighting. Russia was safer in January 2022 than it is in January 2023! Putin has put Russia in danger by his actions and this constitutes by law the crime of High Treason (punishable among other things by the penalty of dismissal from his presidential functions)!
Russia is only saved today because invading it is madness and because Ukraine's ambitions are only the liberation of its territory, not the conquest of Russia. If Ukraine was really in Nazi hands, they might already be around Moscow today because the road between Kyiv and Moscow is wide open, Russian troops are only stationed in eastern and southern Ukraine because Moscow knows for a fact that Ukraine is NOT a threat to Russia. But if Ukraine is not and CANNOT be a threat, what are our citizens doing dying there?
Failure and contradiction. That's all Putin's politics are.
NATO enlargement
Failure on this front is obvious. There is almost no need to explain it. But there are a few aspects about which the media do not speak (or do but very little), and namely how crazy the Russian strategy in this geostrategic question is and especially how Putin managed to make a mistake that the USSR had taken 42 years to avoid.
Since its creation in 1949, NATO has always posed a problem for the USSR. It represented the possibility for the American army to always be able to intervene in Europe in the event of a Soviet military operation. It was therefore an insurmountable obstacle for the USSR in its ambition to spread World Revolution. We had to find a way to get rid of this obstacle. The solution found was to conduct two policies, one passive and the other active. The passive policy was to avoid creating any problem that could lead to NATO enlargement. The active policy was to carry out as many actions as possible to lead to a weakening or destruction of NATO from within. Of course NATO did not collapse in 1991 (when the USSR did collapse) but at least the USSR had succeeded in its first policy: until 1991, NATO never expanded to the east. NATO enlargement could only take place after the collapse of the USSR and was driven by the fear of Eastern European states of a vengeful Russia seeking to invade them again.
For the USSR, one of the priorities for all its branches (military, political, intelligence, etc.) was to prevent Sweden and Finland from joining NATO. Why ? To avoid having a long border to guard between the USSR and Finland and also to keep the straits open for the Baltic fleet (the Strait of Finland and Straits of Sweden).
By his invasion of Ukraine, Putin not only failed to prevent Ukraine's future membership in NATO (he, as we will see a little below, guaranteed this membership), he managed to make the huge mistake of encouraging Finland and Sweden to join NATO. Before the war, the Finns were proud of their neutrality which allowed them to deal with Russia with a favorable position, less than 20% of the population wanted Finland to be a member of NATO. This number is now close to 80%. Apparently the “best commercial agent of the year” for NATO is Vladimir Putin!!! And what does he say about this enlargement? First that Russia is capable of carrying out another "special military operation" in these countries if they submit an application and then backtracking and saying that these memberships do not bother Russia (once Putin has understood that if Ukraine has been able to stop its army, now is not the time to attempt even crazier operations in the Nordic countries). But if the enlargement of NATO to the north and directly to the Russian borders “does not pose any problems”, why intervene in Ukraine? As usual, nothing makes sense, and everything is improvisation and illogical justification for not facing reality.
As for Ukraine, it wanted to join NATO to avoid a Russian invasion. We now know she was right. NATO did not want Ukraine to join to avoid an invasion of Ukraine by Russia. We now know she was wrong. Russia only invaded Ukraine BECAUSE UKRAINE IS NOT IN NATO. The mistaken idea of the western real politik was to believe that since Ukraine would not join NATO, Russia would have no excuse to invade. This reasoning would have been correct if the West were dealing with someone rational. But Putin has shown us that he is no longer rational. Has he lost his mind in his pride as a "Great strategist who is always right", reinforced by a court always telling him what he wants to hear? Or did he believe he could quickly invade Ukraine without anyone reacting and then sell it to the Russian people by posing as the one who stopped NATO expansion? We don't know, but in any case he didn't act rationally and has badly faceplanted.
Now Ukraine cannot join NATO until it reconquers its occupied territories and wins this war (NATO statutes are clear, a state at war or a state with territorial disputes cannot join the Alliance before the resolution of these crises). The West (unwittingly of course) failed Ukraine by refusing its membership and thus allowed Russia to carry out its invasion. The aid the West is giving Ukraine today is as much a rational and calculated policy as it is a way of making amends for its wrongdoing vis-à-vis Ukraine.
But all this also means that Ukraine will join NATO. She earned that right by defending democracy and freedom, she earned that right by defending NATO's eastern flank against Russian expansionism, she earned that right by inflicting this personal humiliation on Putin. The only way now for Putin to keep Ukraine out of NATO is to continue the war indefinitely and by illegally occupying its territory (hence its need to annex the occupied territories). But does it have the capacities, the resources, the finances to keep going? No.
So Ukraine will enter NATO (and contribute to NATO's advance towards Russian borders) because of Putin and his illegal war. Putin therefore has to his credit the strategic encirclement of Russia by NATO. And this encirclement will inevitably lead to the strategic capitulation of Russia (I will write a dedicated article on this subject called “Strategic reorientation of Russia and relations with NATO”).
Conclusion
“Denazification”? Bitter failure.
Disarmament of Ukraine? Bitter failure.
End of NATO enlargement? Bitter failure.
Putin… The man who failed to do what the USSR could do with its eyes closed. The man who in a single decision managed to create a situation that the USSR had taken 42 years to avoid. The man who expanded NATO to the borders of Russia. The man who armed Ukraine and disarmed Russia (via avoidable human and material losses due to tactical and strategic errors).
One could almost believe that Putin is in fact a CIA agent working for this famous “collective West”, so successful has he been in destroying the future of Russia. He has achieved what no enemy of Russia has ever achieved. He put Russia in a weak position and destroyed it from within. He succeeded in placing Russia in a situation of weakness even worse than what it experienced in 1991! He succeeded in putting Russia's enemies in a position of strength (the “enemies” as claimed by the propaganda of course). He is in fact a real foreign agent! (This is a cynical reference to the title given in Russia to Putin's political enemies who are discredited in the media as so-called "Foreign Agents"). No "foreign agent" in Russia has ever been as effective as Vladimir Putin.