Françoise Thom is an associate professor of Russian and an emeritus lecturer in contemporary history at the Sorbonne University. Author of several books on Russia and the USSR, she deciphers for France 24 the texts of several Kremlin propagandists. Among them, the words of the Russian intellectual Alexander Prokhanov, who said in 2006: "For any empire, borders are floating, they can and must be moved. The more space you control, the less likely you are to get eaten by others."

"This Darwinian vision, where the big eats the small, makes international relations a kind of 'Jurassic Park', and it is this same logic that is at the basis of the war against Ukraine," says Françoise Thom. On France 24, the Russologist answers a historical question: why did the Western elites, in their majority, and despite these signals, not be able to predict the invasion of Ukraine?

>>> On the same subject: Seen from Russia, a chronicle that decrypts Moscow's propaganda

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