First of all a long speech, two decades of resentment and grievances concentrated in an impromptu televised address full of cold anger, sighs and barely veiled threats addressed to the West and to Ukraine, an obsession of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Then, a few hours later, late in the evening of Monday February 21, the first columns of armored vehicles which made their entry into the Donbass, timidly filmed by inhabitants posted at their windows.
Between the two, a decision that the head of the Kremlin presented as “necessary and matured for a long time” but which plunges Ukraine and the whole of Europe into an area of uncertainty and turbulence: the recognition “immediate” by Russia of the independence of the two separatist entities of the Ukrainian Donbass, the “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk. Decision followed by the almost immediate dispatch of troops to support them.
In the confrontation open for several months with the West, this decision constitutes a major escalation. Until now, Vladimir Putin had taken care to appear in the second line, leaving the formal initiative to his counterparts in Donbass or even Belarus. He himself was content to promise, in a vague way, an answer “military-technical” after the Westerners refused to grant Russia the “security guarantees” that she has been asking for since the fall of 2021.
Mr Putin linked these two topics – the conflict in Donbass and the broader question of the role of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Europe – by making Ukraine “a colony with a puppet regime” transformed into an instrument of struggle, including military, against Russia. In particular, he mentioned the possibility “serious” for Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons.
Previously, in this same long speech, he had returned to his favorite theme, the “madness” what would have been the “creation” of modern Ukraine by the Soviet Union. The Russian President continued his long historical development to the point of evoking the ” corruption “ in Kiev, betrayal by Ukraine “of our common values” or the transformation of Crimea into a “terror hotbed”.
Oukase and staging
With regard to the conflict in the Donbass, this initiative by Mr Putin puts a definitive end to the diplomatic sequence opened eight years ago by the Minsk agreements, and therefore to the hope of a peaceful and political settlement of this conflict. Paradoxically, Russia is also losing one of its favorite levers of pressure against Kiev, whether it is the denunciation of Ukraine’s shortcomings or the loss of sovereignty that would have been implied for this country the implementation of the agreements – signed successively in September 2014 and February 2015 after direct interventions by the regular Russian army.
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