The Putin enigma – Opinion – 03/06/2022

If you look at it for comparison, Vladimir Putin looks like one of the villains of the James Bond movies, especially the ones starring Sean Connery.

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His face has that just touch of hieraticism and coldness of those caricatures, to the point that 20 years ago Madeleine Albright, the first female Secretary of State of the United States government during the presidency of Bill Clinton, described him as follows: “Putin is small and pale; so cold that he is almost reptilian.” I do not know such a brief and ruthless semblance about someone who today has the whole world on edge.

Since Russia began the invasion of Ukraine on Thursday, February 24, Putin has occupied the center of information, along with the deployment of Russian troops and the exodus of Ukrainians to Poland and other nearby and neighboring nations. The impact of this long-announced invasion has been such that the covid-19 pandemic disappeared from the news and planetary concerns as if it no longer existed. The star of this disaster, with an exclusive role, is undoubtedly the president of the Russian Federation, who today has become the revived Hitler of the 21st century.

The comparison with Adolf Hitler is easy: the prolegomena of the invasion of Ukraine are related to the previous actions of the führer before the German invasion of Poland, on September 1, 1939, the official date of the beginning of World War II. Previously, Hitler had annexed Austria and his demands for the recovery of the Sudetenland determined the erroneous policy of “appeasement” that motivated the Munich Pact of 1938, with which the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Neville Chamberlain, believed to stop the expansionist efforts of Germany sacrificing Czechoslovakia. In the present, Chechnya, the annexation of Georgia, Crimea and other imperialist actions emerge as a clear parallelism between the pan-Germanic desires of the Austrian cape and the tsarist revival of the former KGB agent born in 1952 in St. Petersburg – at that time Stalingrad . But, that is the end of the similarities, because for now the Russian blitzkrieg has not been completely effective so far and Ukraine is resisting more than Putin and his generals expected.

Today the world is very different from that of 1939. The Soviet Union derived from the war does not exist and China is the second world power. The European Union is a group of nations weakened by the pandemic crisis, the uncontrollable migratory flows, the ineptitude of some of its rulers and the loss of one of its main partners, Great Britain, due to Brexit. Angela Merkel, the only coherent political figure of European and world importance, is missed today.

As for the United States, it is known that it lost its status as the world’s policeman long ago and the influence it once had on planetary geopolitics has diminished. As of September 11, 2001 and from George W. Bush to here, everything has been setback and gradual withdrawal of troops from whatever place it invaded before. Today Donald Trump boasts that during his presidency, Putin – whom he called a genius – did not mobilize a single tank to invade anyone. But he avoids referring to the real estate deals that he had undertaken in Russia before becoming president with the acquiescence of the new Hitler. He forgets, too, that thanks to Putin and his team of hackers, he was elected president.

What is very clear is that the West today lacks political leaders capable of facing this crisis with the courage and determination that Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Charles de Gaulle did in the face of Hitler’s overflow. Of course, Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union also faced Hitler, but before that it had concluded a non-aggression pact that allowed Germany to concentrate on its western front while its eastern backs were covered. That pact worked for almost two years.

What we see today is Emmanuel Macron talking endlessly at a kilometric table with Putin, who lied to him and distracted him to betray his sayings a few days later. Boris Johnson, after the embarrassing pandemic parties at 10 Downing Street, overreacts his ridiculous clown look with threats that he doesn’t know if he can fulfill. Joe Biden trusts the work of economic and banking restrictions to stop the Russian megalomaniac. We witness the complicit and mysterious silence of China and Xi Jinping and we are moved by the claim of the president of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelensky, sleepless and emaciated, trying to get the West to help him with something more than declarations, UN resolutions or removal of the keys Swift to Russian banks. Biden also promised to go after Russian oligarchs and locate their accounts and yachts! In truth, all this seems little in the face of a situation that includes the atomic threat.

It seems that no one who opposes Putin’s designs knows how many disasters await the world if he is not stopped. The invasion of Ukraine was inevitable, but nothing was planned to deal with it. Comparing him to Hitler is a communication resource that should clarify that, in any case, it is Hitler with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Given this and as the Argentine journalist Marcelo Longobardi commented, the two options that the West has in the face of the problem are disastrous: do nothing and allow the invasion to succeed or confront it militarily and start World War III.

Will Putin push the red button? Nobody knows. Since December 31, 1999 when he became acting President of Russia after the resignation of Boris Yelt-sin, he is the main Russian politician and has steadily accumulated power. A lawyer and former KGB, Putin has given the analysts and the espionage of the great powers time to measure his oil and find out how far he can go. However, apparently that is not known and today it remains a menacing enigma that he can cut off the gas -literally- to the European Union to begin with.

Many experts speculate about his paranoid and phobic condition of human closeness for fear of contagion from covid-19. They analyze his gestures and the way he places his shoulders. They study their messages and speeches. They speculate with clues that clarify nothing and turn Putin into an unpredictable and indecipherable villain. James Joyce said that tyrants are enigmas weary of his tyranny, ready to be dethroned.

Perhaps that is Putin’s unconscious desire: to immolate himself in a holocaust that destroys everything.

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