“Putin’s hatred of Ukraine has nothing to do with Russia’s “security” and its encirclement – quite real and suffocating – by NATO and the Western imperialists! Sooner or later Putin would have sent his army to Ukraine anyway, just as he sent it to Chechnya to raze Grozny to the ground at the beginning of his presidency, without there being the slightest threat from NATO to Russia’s security.”
That is what we wrote only three days after the launch of Putin’s war against Ukraine (1). Today, several weeks and tens of thousands of deaths later, taking stock of the way Putin is conducting this war, one can only be surprised that a certain left-wing persists in evoking “NATO’s threats against Russia’s security” to “understand” if not to justify the invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s military steamroller…
First of all, it is necessary to note that it is not only the acts, but also the words of Putin himself that plead in favor of this assertion. Indeed, speaking at length to his compatriots to justify the invasion of Ukraine, which was to take place three days later, Putin developed one single argument: the historical non-existence of Ukraine as a nation and therefore its impossibility of existing as a state separate from the Russian motherland! And all this peppered with anathemas launched against the Bolsheviks and, especially, against Lenin “the author and architect of today’s Ukraine”…
Maybe it is not a coincidence that the article we wrote(2), as early as March 3, about this televised address of President Putin to the Russian nation, was systematically rejected and ignored without the slightest explanation -in Greece but also in other countries around the world- by all those who support Putin or at least, find justifications for his war against Ukraine. And yet, paradoxically, the article in question is full of very long quotations from Putin’s televised speech, indeed most of it repeats the words of the Russian president himself! So, since the content of this “historical” speech of Putin remains carefully hidden and is therefore absent from the overwhelming majority of the Western left-wing websites, the logical conclusion should be that all those who claim that the deep reason for Putin’s war against Ukraine is the encirclement of Russia by NATO, go so far as to… censor Putin when the Russian president contradicts their own views. That is, when he categorically denies their description of this war as an armed inter-imperialist confrontation and not as a brutal aggression of Russian imperialism against an independent country, Ukraine.
But this entire left-wing microcosm does not only censor President Putin. It also systematically censors his ideologists and advisers, all those ultra-reactionary “philosophers” and other Great Russian nationalists who populate the Kremlin and profess the return to the greatness of the Russian empire during the tsarist era and thus… the disappearance of independent Ukraine. Such as the real guru of Putin and the international far right, Alexander Dugin, who does not hesitate to have his picture taken with the leaders of the Greek neo-Nazis of the now outlawed Golden Dawn! Or the members of the presidential think tank, the very obscurantist and fascistoid Izborsk Club (Изборский Клуб) which has been preaching for a long time what Putin is currently saying and doing in Ukraine. Or finally, this Timofei Sergeitsev whose text published a few days ago by the very official news agency Novosti, explains that the famous “denazification” of Ukraine professed by Putin amounts in reality to the generalized ethnic cleansing if not the extermination (!) of the Ukrainian people! Well, this… “bizarre” left prefers to pass under silence and censor the very eloquent texts and declarations of all this “bad company” of the Russian president. What for? Well, obviously so that they can continue to tell their enormous lies that have no relation to reality…
However, in addition to words, there are Putin’s actions that contradict all those who evoke “NATO’s threats against Russia” to “understand” or even justify his war against Ukraine. And the history of his actions leaves no doubt: Putin has never needed the slightest “threat against the security of Russia”, to always act with the same extreme brutality that he currently exhibits in his war against the Ukrainian people! In fact, what was the threat to Russia’s security when he leveled Grozny and exterminated a quarter of the Chechen population? The answer is that there was none. Just as there was no threat when he declared war and destabilized Georgia by taking away South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In the two cases of Chechnya and Georgia, and without forgetting the recent sending of Russian troops to Kazakhstan to help the local tyrant repress the revolt of his population, Putin had only one objective, the same as today in his war against Ukraine: to drown in blood the democratic and independentist aspirations of all those who do not accept to be subjected to the diktats of Russian imperialism and the totalitarian and liberticidal regime of Vladimir Putin.
What follows is even more eloquent. Obviously, Putin was not responding to any external threat to Russia’s security when he initiated the carve-up of Ukraine, effectively annexing the eastern part of Donbass and Crimea. And he responded even less to external threats when he flattened -together with his accomplice the dictator Bashar al Assad- martyred cities of Syria such as Aleppo or Idlib with the same extreme brutality which he is now using in razing Mariupol to the ground. But, it is surely because Putin has been allowed undisturbed to carry out his serial crimes in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria, that he has now decided to invade Ukraine, confident that he will remain unpunished once more.
Finally, it makes no sense to expect this campist left to protest against the crimes of Putin’s foreign policy when we know how deafening was and remains its silence towards the crimes of his domestic policy whose main victim is the Russian population itself. In reality, whether or not it is subservient to Putin, this campist left has always swallowed all the senseless lies offered by Putin, including his assertion, repeated in such a monotonous way, that his Syrian, Ukrainian and even Russian adversaries are part of a diabolical plot that makes them systematically prefer…to bomb themselves, to poison themselves and to kill themselves in order to attribute their death to Putin’s barbarism!
So, let’s conclude this text as we started it: “Putin’s hatred against Ukraine has nothing to do with Russia’s “security” and its encirclement – quite real and suffocating – by NATO and the Western imperialists!” Moreover, when it is Putin himself who asserts this so categorically not only by his words but also by his actions, one can only… believe him. Everything else, including the “theories” about the inter-imperialist war taking place on Ukrainian soil or about the threats to Russia’s security, are nothing but artificial constructions with no relation to reality, pursuing a single objective: to confuse, to disorient, to sow doubt and finally to absolve Putin and his cronies of their monstrous crimes…