Columns

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”.

Françoise Thom’s latest analysis on DeskRussie was well received, as was « The second front: how Russia wants to undermine Western support for Ukraine ». Who benefits from the crime? Who benefits from the destabilisation of today’s world, if not Vladimir Putin and his supporters: China, Iran, North Korea, not forgetting Hamas, who want to establish a new world order? The Valdaï speech illustrates this desire to « destroy the international order to replace it with chaos » in order to “indulge in unrestrained depredations”, as Françoise Thom puts it. Russia’s support for Hamas displayed by Putin and his propagandists is the latest illustration… As President Biden reminded us, in Ukraine as in Gaza, Putin is in charge. Putin’s speech at Valdaï deserves to be better known ! It has an air of déjà vu about it…