Vladimir Putin turned 70 this Friday (7) with a gift from the Norwegian Nobel Committee. By anointing anti-Kremlin regime forces with the prestigious Peace Laureate, organizers have symbolically sealed the Russian president as the pet pariah of the West.
Not that Putin cares, on the contrary: it’s great for his rhetoric of walling Russia in a hostile world that he sees anti-government activists hailed by the West. Naturally, in a context where he equates his regime with the nation.
In the infamous speech in which he decreed the annexation of four territories that he does not fully control in Ukraine, last Friday (30), the president passed on his entire litany of criticism of what he sees as a group of countries subservient to the United States in Europe, aimed at in the end to thwart Russian freedom and bury its historical heritage.
The problem for Putin is that his rhetoric has resonated through the increasingly fragile walls of an elite that is increasingly opposed to the course of the Ukraine War. Not so much for the breach of the Budapest Memorandum, in which Moscow among other things recognized the ex-Soviet borders of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan in 1994.
But there are public signs of discontent with the war and the international isolation applied to Russia. It’s good to be clear: the calls are more for a more violent war than for immediate peace. The political alley appears to be quite narrow for Putin, who has always ruled by division and Darwinian struggle between elite factions.
In that sense, for those dissatisfied with seeing their yachts and overseas accounts imprisoned, Putin’s rivals’ awards only confirm that their world will never go back to February 23, the eve of the invasion. For the hard line, it’s confirmation that it’s time to double down.
Also significant in the award is the choice of activists from the triad of countries originating in the former Kievan Rus, depositories of common linguistic, religious and historical heritage. The Minsk dictatorship has gone from being a malleable Putin ally to his vassal, and Ukraine is under aggression. In both cases, the central motivation is geopolitical, to regain the strategic depth between the largest country in the world and Europe.
In particular, the choice of Memorial, a human rights NGO founded in the final years of the communist empire that was dissolved by the courts last year. The historic role of his performance, from supporting imprisoned dissidents to defending gay rights in Chechnya, is enormous.
It is the second shot aimed at Putin in two years, after the 2021 award for journalist Dmitri Muratov, who saw his newspaper Novaia Gazeta become a digital refugee, banned from operating on Russian soil.
Finally, the Nobel Peace Prize showed an astuteness not seen in other editions, when, for example, a Barack Obama was awarded in his first year of government – ​​he would not deserve the prize even after eight years in the White House.
The committee escaped the trap of rewarding Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s controversial president turned hero in the West for his dogged, US-armed resistance to the Russian invasion. If he were the laureate, the years of corruption and authoritarian practices of the leader would be washed away.
Zelensky marked his tenure until the war by wavering policies, persecution of the opposition and imposition of the Ukrainian language on Russian-speaking populations. He did not, of course, carry out the genocide Putin accuses him of, but he was not exactly welcome in the east and south of the country.
The Ukrainian leader is viewed with suspicion in the West itself, due to the available reports that he is not considered trustworthy, does not share his military decisions with those who support them in practice and acts on impulse. But that’s what we have for today, and his bravery in the resistance is enough to justify the moral position of Washington and its allies.
Furthermore, there would be the contradiction of making a man-in-arms Nobel Peace Prize winner, who the day before had asked NATO (Western military alliance) to attack Russia before Putin uses a nuclear warhead against the Ukrainians, ignoring World War III. that such an act would bring about—”Armageddon,” as President Joe Biden called it the same day.
There is more sense in rewarding an NGO that works with the investigation of war crimes attributed to the Russians, as well as a more unimputable figure, such as the Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski, imprisoned by the dictatorship of Aleksandr Lukachenko.
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