Editorial of the “World”. The war, frontal, is back in Europe. The offensive triggered, at the dawn of 24 February, by the Russian forces on multiple sites of Ukrainian territory constitutes a military aggression of unprecedented magnitude on our continent since the end of the Second World War. It is premeditated, carefully planned and assumed this time without any pretense.
These are no longer soldiers devoid of insignia of an army, as in Crimea in 2014, which entered into action. The deployment of force does not hide more behind the fighters of the two puppet republics of the Donbass. The war is this time assumed in each of the words of the head of the Russian state, Vladimir Putin. Its objective is limpid: break Ukraine. And its threats to any obstacle to this will are also explicit: “Whoever intends to put on our way or threatening our country and our people must know that the Russian response will be immediate and will have consequences never seen in your history,” A-T he hammered in his brief speech marking the triggering of operations – in fact a declaration of war.
You have to write it as clearly as it assumes it in words: Vladimir Putin is the manager of this major conflict. No western clumsiness, no historical error, none of the arguments put forward by the Russian regime and its defenders for years can not justify the attack that has just begun.
Clanic evolution
This willingness to impose the law of the strongest, this contempt of international law find their origin in the double drift of Vladimir Putin since its accession to power in 2000. The first is the autocratic turn of more and more Pronounced by his diet, organized around his person and his obsessions. Over the years and mandates, Putin has imposed absolute control over civil society. The assassination in 2006 of the Anna Politkovskaya investigative journalist was already boring the mark of this system. The attempt at poisoning in August 2020 from the critic of the Alexei Navalny regime, today imprisoned, and the harassment of its supports, was another sign of this permanent drift. Start 2022, a comedian had to flee Russia for criticizing one of the oligarchs, close to the Head of State, Evgueni Prigojine, whose mercenaries, Wagner, deployed Syria to Mali to the Central African Republic. and Libya, at the price of abuses ever assumed by Moscow.
Opponents, journalists and today parliamentarians, counselors: over the years, all the actors of a temperate political life by rules and constraints have been dismissed, more and more brutally, of a restricted circle obnuché by the defense of his riches and his privileges. The second drift stems directly from this clan evolution. Since its “Orange Revolution” of 2004, Ukrainian democracy has become the absolute repulse of the Kremlin. Its evolutions are experienced as an existential threat. It is to this independence, of view, of spirit, of behavior, that Putin now intends to put an end by force.
So it’s good international law that is violated here. It is the European security order from the end of the cold war that is now challenged. What can the West do? Democratic countries today pay the weakness of their reaction to the preceding violations of international law by Vladimir Putin.
When, by order of Mr. Putin, the Russian forces occupied part of the Georgian territory in 2008, this aggression remained impunity. When, in 2014, by order of Mr. Putin, Russia attached Crimea and then intervened in the Donbass in support of Prorussian separatists, the European and American response to this flagrant violation of the sovereignty and integrity of the Ukrainian territory. has been limited to sanctions certainly uncomfortable but calculated, not to cause major damage to Western economies.
It is seen today, these sanctions have failed. They did not divert Vladimir Putin from his deep design, which is to redesign the map of Europe by recappropling a sphere of influence. Western democracies must now take note of this failure and adopt against the regime of Mr. Putin’s much stronger measures, assuming the cost they will have for their own savings. This is the minimum price to pay if one really wants to enforce the fundamental principles of international law.