President Vladimir Putin has sent Russian troops to invade Ukraine but has made it clear that his real target transcends the neighboring country: it is America’s “empire of lies”. And he threatened “anyone who tries to interfere with us” with “consequences they have never faced in their history.”
In a speech filled with historic grievances and accusations of a relentless plot against his country, Putin reminded the world on Thursday that Russia “is still one of the most powerful nuclear states”, endowed with “a certain advantage in various weapons”. cutting edge”.
His speech to justify the invasion appears to have come closer to threatening nuclear war than any declaration by a major world leader in recent decades. His immediate objective was obvious: to stop any possible Western military initiative, making it clear that he will not hesitate to escalate hostilities.
Given Russia’s nuclear arsenal, he said: “There can be no doubt that any potential aggressor will face defeat and dire consequences if he attacks our country directly. All necessary decisions in this regard have already been taken.”
The invasion of Ukraine and the thinly veiled nuclear threat ended European notions of security and the premise of peace that the continent has lived with for generations. The post-war European project, which produced stability and prosperity, has now entered a new, uncertain and confrontational stage.
In the run-up to the Russian invasion, Western leaders made the pilgrimage to Moscow to try to persuade Putin not to implement their plan. The Americans essentially offered a return to gun control. Frenchman Emmanuel Macron was willing to look to a new security architecture if Putin was dissatisfied with the old one.
The sincere, possibly naive, confidence of Macron and German Prime Minister Olaf Scholz in the possibility of getting Putin to act with reason suggests a chasm between the worlds they inhabit. The Russian leader wasn’t interested in using a fine scalpel to perfect Europe’s security order — he wanted to wield a blunt machete to carve, Cold War-style, a clear line between mine and yours.
Europe has rediscovered its vulnerability. Macron said on Thursday that Putin “has decided to provoke the most serious breach in decades of peace and stability in our Europe”. Of the Ukrainians, he said that “their freedom is our freedom”.
But no European country, not even the US, will put lives at risk for that freedom. The question, therefore, is how they can draw an impassable line for Putin.
After the short war he fought in Georgia in 2008, his annexation of Crimea in 2014, his orchestration of the 2014 military conflict in eastern Ukraine that created two separatist regions, and his military intervention in Syria in 2015, Putin has evidently concluded that the Russia’s willingness to use the Armed Forces to further its strategic objectives will go unanswered by the US and its European allies.
“Russia wants insecurity in Europe because strength is its trump card,” says Michel Duclos, a former French ambassador. “She never wanted a new security order, whatever European illusions about it. Putin decided some time ago that a confrontation with the West was his best option.”
Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, says the talk of nuclear conflict is worrying. “But I find it hard to believe that any world leader, Putin included, would seriously contemplate using nuclear weapons in any of the scenarios we have here, for the simple reason that he understands the consequences.”
Even so, history has already shown that European wars involving a major global power can get out of control. A long war in Ukraine could eventually end up involving Poland, Hungary or Slovakia. Central Europe and the Baltic States, specifically NATO’s front line against Russia, will live with a climate of credible threat for some time.
A grim scenario – unlikely, but less unlikely than it was before the invasion – is that Putin, who demanded that NATO withdraw from the former Soviet republics, returning to its pre-1997 formation, ends up turning his attention to Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. .
Duclos suggests that Putin’s goal may well be to install a puppet Russian government in Kiev. “If he can do that, he will want the same thing in the Baltic States.”
Subjugated in the Soviet empire after World War II, the three countries joined NATO in 2004. President Joe Biden has promised that the US and its allies will “defend every inch of territory” in the alliance — a Russian attack on tiny Estonia could trigger the conflagration.
Immediately after the Russian invasion, the three Baltic states and Poland triggered Article 4 of the group’s founding treaty, which allows members to hold consultations when they feel their territorial integrity is threatened.
Most European states, especially France, saw the US conviction that a Russian invasion was practically inevitable as too alarmist, but the differences were glossed over in the name of diplomatic effort.
In the end, the diplomatic efforts in which Europeans put faith were doomed to failure. That’s because Putin, increasingly isolated, plunged into a revanchist rage. The growing anger over the past two decades is aimed at what he sees as the West’s humiliation of Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union and NATO’s subsequent eastward expansion.
But the Russian leader has turned his outrage into a worldview that consumes him, based on the idea of ​​US iniquity. It remains to be seen what this will mean in military terms in the coming years.
“Almost everywhere, in many regions of the world where the US has taken its law and order, it has created bloody wounds that never heal,” he said. “The entire so-called Western bloc formed by the US in its own image and likeness is the very same ’empire of lies’.”
Putin seemed to ignore the fact that the choreography of the Russian invasion has been marked by extraordinary, if predictable, ambiguous language, made up of statements that reverse the facts. It includes accusations of “humiliation and genocide” and Russian recognition of the independence of the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Lugansk so that they could “ask for assistance” under the UN Charter.
In the end, Putin appears to have had no hesitation in ordering Russian forces to enter Ukraine. He accused Kiev authorities — all neo-Nazi usurpers, in his view — of wanting to “acquire nuclear weapons” for an inevitable confrontation.
Ukraine has possessed a vast nuclear arsenal in the past, until it relinquished it in 1994 under an agreement in which Russia participated, promising in return that it would never use force or threats against Ukraine and that it would respect its sovereignty and existing borders.
