Russia survived the Napoleonic invasion, the collapse of the Tsarist Empire, Hitler’s aggression, seven decades of communism, the Gulag, the loss of its central European base, the dislocation of the USSR… It will survive the Putin era well, but in what state? By exploiting Russia’s past, Vladimir Putin has stolen its future. His adventurism in Ukraine set in motion an accelerated disaster. Thousands of young people were sacrificed as cannon fodder on the Donbass front; hundreds of thousands of others, among the best educated and best trained, have chosen exile.
The largest country in the world has cut itself off from its link with Europe, to which it belongs culturally and towards which it has looked for three centuries. He became a quasi-vassal of China. Its economy is on the ground, its immense energy resources have lost most of their outlets. The master of the Kremlin has turned great Russia into a pariah state. His ambition was that of a neo-imperial restoration; his war will most likely remain as the last gasp of a declining empire. And on the field of ruins that it will leave, many “experts” and French politicians will have to wonder how they did not see anything coming.
Consult our file: The Russian question
