THE WAR IN UKRAINE WILL NOT HAPPEN

Even the most bewildered of our fellow citizens have become aware that Putin gave the order, on February 24, 2022, to invade Ukraine to bring it back into line. Following this event, it may or may not be the occasion to put our ideas back in place.

The media is working hard to provide us with a suitable reading of the events: Putin is crazy, the Ukrainians are resisting, and we have taken sanctions that will hurt the Russian population, which will inevitably turn against the dictator.

It is a question of reassuring us by telling that what is happening in Ukraine is not normal and that we will return, after a more or less long time of crisis, to the previous situation. Thank you for trying to reassure us, but this reading of the "Ukrainian crisis" seems to me totally unrealistic.

On the contrary, it is a shift from a situation in which we were dozing quietly to a much less comfortable state of wakefulness.

We were asleep, when we thought that Putin would never dare to attack the whole Ukraine, at most a small part of the Donbass. I thought so myself, including when I heard the CIA announcing an imminent attack: those CIA morons, I sneered! Putin will never do it because it's too risky... I was wrong.

Yet I knew that Putin had greatly improved his military tool, including developing hypersonic weapons, which he is the only one to possess to date. On May 3, 2020*, in a post titled "On the Edge of Fear" I wrote, among other things, the following, already in bold: "The United States finds itself for the first time in its history in a situation of technological inferiority to Russia on the military level."

And I concluded by noting that "without even imagining that such weapons could never be used, the consequences of their mere existence are yet to come, in terms of power relations and therefore alliances, the premises of which we can see in the Middle East."

We were indeed seeing these premises in Syria.

But I had not been able to draw the consequences of what I wrote nearly two years ago, namely that Russia had the military means to act as it wished, especially since it now possessed the second largest conventional army in the world, behind the United States, but ahead of China, India and France.

On the other hand, it had not escaped me that the Russians in general, and Putin in particular, had been greatly humiliated by the events that followed the fall of the USSR, at the end of 1991, the time of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, the deep distress of the Soviet people, the pensions paid in monkey money, the famine and Russia scorned by the United States, which had never respected its commitment not to extend NATO to Russia's borders.

I also observed how this contempt for Russia was translated into the bombing of Serbia, until the latter consented, bloodless, to the detachment by force of Kosovo, which was both a part of its territory and the founding place of its identity. But it also gave Putin a license to intervene militarily wherever he wished, in Syria, Georgia and now Ukraine.

I have observed how the Russians have continually been treated with condescending contempt, first by the British. They have been successively accused of being cheats, with their exclusion for doping in international sports competitions, murderers through disturbing accusations of poisoning, usurpers because of the role of oligarchs. Russia was only a vulgar gas supplier, whose GDP, hardly higher than Italy's, did not give it a voice on the world stage. 

In Ukraine, I observed how the West unashamedly organized a coup d'état in 2014**, with the active complicity of Laurent Fabius, accompanied by the German and Polish foreign ministers who persuaded President Yanukovych to give in to the opposition. The latter accused him of resisting the EU, which wanted to force him to renounce a friendship treaty with Russia. Faced with a riot strongly supported by the Europeans and Americans, he was forced to flee to Russia before being illegally deposed. 

I have observed how Ukraine, led since 2014 by pro-Western governments, has waged a permanent battle on the Donbass front where it has mobilized up to one hundred thousand troops, cut off the water to Crimea since 2014, signed the Minsk agreements on September 5, 2014*** and then stubbornly refused to implement them, these agreements including a ceasefire, a demilitarized zone on the line of contact, and a dialogue for the creation of a special status related to the conflicting regions of Donetsk and Lugansk.

I observed how the European stakeholders, France and Germany, made no effort to ensure that these agreements were implemented by Ukraine. The conclusion of my post was: "The country still needs to be stabilized with legitimate political power and a good neighbor agreement with Russia. So another regime."

As a result of all these events, here we are with a war and its consequences, which are yet to be understood. 

* In a post entitled "On the edge of fear"

** See my post "Coup in Kiev" of February 24, 2014

*** See my post "Ukraine on the brink of the Rubicon" of February 19, 2017

TO BE FOLLOWED