Françoise Thom

The Kremlin’s “dogma” is flexible. Since the end of World War II, the USSR viewed the United States as its greatest ideological adversary. Under Putin’s leader-ship, it was believed that the war in Ukraine was in fact a war between the U.S. and Russia, with Euro-peans merely acting as American vassals. With Trump, the narrative shifted. Now, Europe is accused of being “fascist,” while Russia and the US are cast as allies for “peace.” Françoise Thom offers a meticulous analysis of this new Russian doctrine, based on a document recently published by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). Desk Russia has decided to publish the full translation of this publication attributed by the SVR to Mr Tcheremnykh and V. Motchalov and asked Françoise Thom to analyse it. The new honeymoon with Washington is forcing the SVR of the Russian Federation to reorient the Russian national narrative. ‘European special services are ready to do anything to achieve their criminal goal, namely to perpetuate the conflict in Ukraine between NATO member states and Russia,’ the SVR warned on its website on 24 April. In the past, we read Krokodil; today, we look at the SVR website! Perhaps Putin’s entourage has decided that the Kremlin’s propa-gandists have become so inept that even Medvedev’s outbursts no longer have any impact.

The collusion, not to say complicity, between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in ousting Volodymir Zelensky and carving up Ukraine in the name of Russian “peace” is undoubtedly Washington’s best-kept secret. How has the United States of America been able to dismantle, in the space of four weeks, an exemplary security architecture and a transatlantic bond that had lasted 80 years? Trump’s America is in the process of carrying out a revolution inspired by the Putin model.
For Françoise Thom, “Trump and Vance have become the instruments of Zelensky’s political assassination. Ukraine publicly abandoned by its main ally from across the Atlantic, in the presence of a Russian journalist no less: this spectacle allows Moscow to hope to proceed to the second phase of its plan, the installation of a “pacifist” collaborator in power in Kyïv…
The Putinization of America is the realization of a plan nurtured by Russian leaders since the mid-1990s.”

The Russian economy, including its military-industrial complex, is showing signs of exhaustion. Prices are soaring, electronic components are in short supply and the labour shortage is becoming dramatic. Migrants from Central Asia often meet with a hostile reception and can hardly replace the tens of thousands of specialists who have left Russia. Is it for these reasons that Putin’s regime is trying to stop the war against Ukraine, but on its own terms, as Viktor Orbán’s initiative shows? According to Françoise Thom, it would be unfortunate if the West were to give in to pressure from the ‘peacemakers’, when the Moscow autocracy is itself at the end of its tether…
Demosthenes, undoubtedly the greatest orator of Antiquity with his Philippics, is still surprisingly relevant today. It should inspire us all.

‘A snake changes its skin, but it doesn’t change its nature’. This old Russian saying is still relevant today and could be applied to the aggressive policies pursued by the Russian and Soviet powers throughout the 20th century. Françoise Thom explains here how the Kremlin and Putin ideologists are working today to break up our societies from within and transform our democratic countries into satellite regimes in Moscow’s thrall. By way of analogy, how can we fail to recall how, just after the end of the Second World War, the USSR took over all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe one by one, bringing straw men to power before lowering a veritable iron curtain over Europe by exercising a Communist dictatorship from within that lasted for half a century, until the Soviet Union collapsed. Today, Vladimir Putin’s regime is using the same levers to manipulate, both left and right, by appealing to nationalism, traditional values and anti-Americanism, in particular, in order to enslave us more effectively. Is France on the road to Putinisation?

In this essay, Françoise Thom analyzes the imperialist and expansionist drive of the Russian Empire, which persists in the Soviet and post-Soviet era. This messianic, expansionist, and militaristic propensity, reaching its peak under Putin, is inseparably linked to the autocratic matrix of Russian power. It is this matrix that Russia must rid itself of if it is to become a normal country, preoccupied with its own prosperity rather than the enslavement of others. European security depends on the eradication of Russian despotism. 

Russian propagandists accuse Europe of having forfeited its moral values and claim that Russia is now the repository of these values. This rhetoric resonates with some conservatives. In this essay, our author examines how, far from defending European “civilization”, the Putin regime has turned into “an apocalyptic sect led by a demented guru”.