“Europe refuses to see that Vladimir Putin actually waged a war against it and against the West”

QWas still waiting for Europe? Ten years ago, when Russian troops occupied Crimea and launched an insurrection of criminals and separatists in eastern Ukraine, we could still afford to be “Shocked” And “Farfful”. Even on the eve of February 24, 2022, after months of deployment of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers, we still refused to believe that we would come to a real large -scale territorial conflict against a European country.

For three years now, Europe has been seeing information almost daily what is happening less than two hours of flight from here: the incessant bombing of cities, the flight of millions of people outside the war areas and beyond the Borders, countless crimes perpetrated against the civilian population, missile strikes near nuclear installations – in short, the annihilation of livelihoods of the Ukrainian nation. It is a question of plunging Ukraine into the cold and the darkness and of constraining it to the capitulation.

All this does not happen somewhere we do not know where but in the heart of Europe. kyiv, a millennial city with its cathedrals and monasteries, is affected. In Kharkiv, metropolis with modernist skyscrapers of the 1920s, whole neighborhoods are in ruins. Even the “little Vienne” (Lviv, the old Lemberg Habsbourg) was not spared from the Russian missiles. Odessa, whose promenade and the staircase of the Potemkin we know thanks to the film by Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), The battleship Potemkin (1927), is delivered to Iranian drone attacks. How would Europeans react if bombs fell on Trieste, Italy, or Marseille?

A dangerous illusion

It is a dangerous illusion of supposing that it is only a Russian-Ukrainian conflict. From the start, the Russian leaders have left no doubt, neither by their declarations or their acts, on their objectives: regain control of central and eastern Europe and restore the Europe of Yalta, that Milan Kundera ( 1929-2023) had one day called the“Kidnapped West”in an article published in 1983 in the journal The debate (Gallimard).

You have 68.87% of this article to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.