On Saturday, at the UN Headquarters, I asked my Russian colleagues their thoughts on the crisis. The answer was immediate and certain: “Europe cornered Russia, you should have expected us to fight back.”
The incident described above did not happen recently but exactly 8 years ago, during the Russian-Ukrainian crisis in Crimea. During the past few days, I’ve had many deja’ vus. At the time, just like today, the UN ambassadors were talking of the risk of a new world war and defining Putin as “out of touch, in a different world.”
In 2014 too, writing an article in this newspaper, I thought: do western leaders really think Putin suddenly went mad? I decided they didn’t, because it would have been truly idiotic to think that Putin, all of a sudden, had become a monster. Yes, to find a Mr. Hyde there has to be a Dr. Jekyll first. But didn’t anyone notice him in the Kremlin for the past 25 years?
Today, seeing civilian buildings in Ukraine being destroyed by the Russian artillery, it’s natural to think of Grozny. Do you remember where that is? It’s the capital of Chechnya, a republic of the Russian federation. I remember very clearly a spread in the New York Times Magazine with a picture of Grozny–I believe it was 1999–completely destroyed and turned to ashes. Grozny, before fighting that war for its independence from Moscow, had about 400.000 inhabitants. After Vladimir Putin got through with it– at the time he was not known by most and had been put in charge by the former alcoholic president Yeltsin–the city had less than half.
Was that former KGB colonel, who had suddenly become prime minister in 1999 and then President in 2002 chiefly due to the popularity he had achieved with that “special military operation”, mentally healthy?
The he had to be also while he poisoned the opponents of his regime–even after they had gone abroad to escape him. Or how about when he used the same criminal tactics he had used against civilians in Chechnya in Syria, going to the rescue of his protege Bashar Assad?
So why would Western leaders, including American presidents from Bush to Biden, meet up with a criminally insane man like this? Let’s not even talk about us Italians, like Prodi or Berlusconi, and all the love and kisses they showered on him…We could say Cherchez l’argent, money is power, as Don Michael Corleone would say in The Godfather–a cult movie that came out exactly fifty years ago. With Putin so far it’s been “not personal, strictly business”. Doing good business with the Russians who were tied to Putin, selling them a soccer team or being able to penetrate the board of directors of one of their large state-owned gas or oil companies, made it impossible to see how “mad” the former KGB official, who found himself leader of the Kremlin, really was.
Now that Ukraine is being invaded and bombarded by Russia, the big evil stepmother, it seems like the West has suddenly awakened: real sanctions, Russia being isolated by the UN’s General Assembly, even Visa and Mastercard ceasing operations in Moscow’s luxury stores while Western brands flee, including giants like Apple and Ikea which closed all of their Russian stores.
A quarter of a century too late Biden, Draghi, Macron, Johnson and Scholz inform us that now, inside the Kremlin, there is only Mr. Hyde. Please stop it with this little tale, the idea that Putin has suddenly gone mad. We have been out of our minds for all these years, thinking that business could make us forget this genuine nightmare. Mostly because of our businesses, for the first time in the history of humanity there is an individual who, alone, leads a large nuclear power, a man that for years has shown us that he is extremely dangerous, a man with no morals or scruples when it comes to violence, who has been using it for ages as a blackmailing and intimidation tool, like a true Mafia boss.
What to do? Even Lenin wondered this before the revolution; then, once in power, things became hard to handle and Stalin was about to show up to fix things. At least Stalin, luckily, died in 1953, when the USSR had just become an atomic power. Since then, and until Putin, no leader in Moscow had been the only man in power, with such a destructive potential.
Vladimir the Terrible, on the other hand, has plenty of time to blow us all up. So, what to do? A war against NATO (that the no fly zone the Ukranians requested would certainly provoke) would be like handing him the solution for his Russia, increasingly liberticidal and already in crisis before the sanctions, on a silver platter, and with a big bang.
The only ones that can save us from the monster we’ve been feeding for so long–because we believed it was “strictly business, and not personal”– are the Russians themselves. Right, those people who–especially the younger generations–were not raised on vodka and the myth of Great Mother Russia to defend against Western encirclement. The Russians, after all, have already had a revolution, and the most popular Bolshevik idea that made them take to the streets in 1917, even more than communism, was to end a war which they no longer wanted to fight.
Only the Russians, with unusable credit cards in their pockets and children sent to fight in Ukraine for a war that they can’t even refer to as such (without risking 15 years in jail under Putin’s law), can free us from the “madman” that we elevated, for almost 25 years, to something even worse than a Tsar: a real “Mafia” boss of Cosa Russia.
Translated by Emma Pistarino.
