On February 24, 2022, a speech by Vladimir Putin was broadcast on television as Russian troops entered Ukraine, triggering the largest military operation initiated on European soil since the Second World War.
In his speech, the Russian president justifies the invasion by a violent diatribe against Kiev, presented as "neo-Nazi", and by the threat that NATO and the United States would pose to Russia.
This rhetoric, far from being new, is part of a long history, which dates back to the Maidan Revolution in 2014 and the Orange Revolution of 2004. Decryption with historian Françoise Thom, specialist in post-communist Russia.
France 24: In February 2022, Vladimir Putin justified the invasion of Ukraine by the need to protect Russia from NATO and the West. When did the Kremlin use this rhetoric?
Françoise Thom
:
Vladimir Putin's anti-Western rhetoric goes back a long way.
We can date the turn of the Kremlin's discourse to the color revolutions, in 2003-2004.
At that time, anti-corruption and liberal pro-democracy revolutions broke out in several post-Soviet states, notably in Georgia – we are talking about the Rose Revolution – and in Ukraine, where the Orange Revolution took place in 2004.
In my opinion, the current war has its roots in the Orange Revolution, experienced by Putin as a humiliation.
In the 2004 elections, the candidate supported by Vladimir Putin, Viktor Yanukovych, failed to be elected against a pro-European candidate, Viktor Yushchenko.
Putin experienced the sequence as a personal snub and developed an intense hatred for Ukraine and Ukrainians.
He interpreted the situation as resulting from manipulation by the Americans: for this former KGB man, the failure of his candidate in Ukraine could only come from American shenanigans.
His paranoid rhetoric comes from there.
As early as 2004, a text by a Kremlin ideologist, Vladislav Surkov, said in essence: “the enemy is at our gates, we must defend every Russian and every house against the West”.
And in 2007, at the Munich conference, Putin challenged the West, and more specifically the Americans.
He also launched the modernization of the Russian army in 2008. The war against Ukraine therefore has very ancient roots.
It is far from being an improvisation, and it is part of a much broader context, which is the confrontation with the West.
American foundations were however at work in Ukraine and Georgia in the years 1990-2000. What was their role, denounced by Putin
?
There were indeed American foundations, in Ukraine as in Georgia, during the color revolutions.
These applied to form a new generation of executives, called to succeed the apparatchiks of the communist era.
But they should not be seen as emanations from an American state policy: they did not necessarily have the same political line as the president in place.
These foundations played a role in the color revolutions insofar as they taught techniques of electoral struggle and organization on the ground to these new elites, in order to constitute the basis for the development of political parties on a liberal model.
But the revolutionary movements that broke out in 2003-2004 were absolutely not artificial: the population was revolted against post-communist corruption, and the elites themselves were split.
The action of American foundations in the color revolutions was therefore greatly exaggerated by Vladimir Putin, who also attributed to them an anti-Russian orientation that they did not necessarily have.
Their goal was above all to help bring about the end of communism, ten years after the fall of the Wall, and to build liberal democracies.
What about the Kremlin's relationship with the European Union
?
Did the capture of Crimea in 2014 mark a change
?
In 2013, it was an association offered by the European Union to post-Soviet countries, including Ukraine and the countries of the Caucasus, which sparked the fire.
The project conflicts with Putin's desire to integrate Ukraine into a customs union, the Eurasian Union, dominated by Russia.
Putin seeks to build a large European space, from Brest to Vladivostok, where Russia could establish its hegemony by chasing American influence.
Under pressure from the Kremlin, the pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych therefore renounced the association agreement with the European Union in 2013, and accepted Ukraine's integration into the Eurasian Union.
But huge protests are taking place in Ukraine.
It will be the "Maidan Revolution" in 2014, an uprising that Viktor Yanukovych tries to suppress but which ends up escaping him.
The Ukrainian president then fled, and a new government was set up in Ukraine, which Putin described for the first time as "Nazi".
A few days later, Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea.
He then claims that he is doing it to protect Russia from NATO, that Crimea has always been Russian, and that it was ceded by mistake to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954. He is also trying to conquer the southern and eastern Ukraine, but must be content with the creation of two separatist enclaves in the east.
The confrontation ended with the conclusion of the Minsk agreements on September 5, 2014.
The hostility of the Kremlin is then largely focused on the United States: Putin's project is to replay the end of the Cold War, but winning this time, in order to restore the power of Russia.
In this context, if Putin made anti-European remarks, it was above all because of the links of the European Union with the United States and NATO.
Until February 2022, Europe was not seen as a real political subject by Putin, but rather as an object that he disputed with the United States.
He thought he was using Europeans' reliance on Russian gas to subjugate Europe - it worked for a while, until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. His rhetoric became even more hostile towards -to the EU when it became glaring in February 2022 that Europe was closing ranks around NATO.
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