A few hours were enough to shatter the foundations of the order of the world. History will remember that it was on 24 February, 2022, that Putin committed the irreparable by invading Ukraine, that the West, dumbfounded, entered a new era, violently emerging from its collective lethargy in the face of the master of the Kremlin. The inconceivable has happened, war has struck Europe, and suddenly a new deal is being written in the chaos of Russia's heinous attack.
For even if it is not (yet) World War III, what started in the smoldering ashes of the explosions in Kyiv, is indeed a conflict of unheard implications, the largest geographical upheaval, we have seen since 1945.
By sending his tanks into Ukraine, Putin has done more than trying to take over a sovereign state with democratically elected leaders, independent since the end of the Soviet Union. He has violated an iron law of international equilibrium and defied the rest of the world, revealing his game to all those who, naive or complicit, have refused to admit for too long: the Russian president is now the number one enemy of world peace.
It is no longer time to wonder whether Putin has lost his mind or what his hidden agenda is. We must now take him and his wildest claims seriously. He is rational in his parallel system, and above all, he has made his warlike intentions clear on more than one occasion. But make no mistake: it is not the rebirth of a lost greatness that Putin wishes to conquer by attacking Ukraine, a country that he claims as the mythical cradle of Russia. What Putin is attacking is the nascent democracy that emerged in Kyiv, with the Orange Revolution in 2004 and then, the Maidan Revolution in 2014. What he wants to destroy, while abjectly calling for the "denazification" of the country, is indeed the very idea of the new Ukraine. What he fears most is the contagion of this democratic movement to his own country, because why shouldn't what works in Kyiv work in Moscow?
Putin spoke of the structural weakness of the West, which no longer uses the concept of war except as a deterrent or in external theatres such as Afghanistan or Mali. The brutality of the very idea of war has indeed become alien to us, and we are reluctant to use force directly, for fear of escalation.
Nato, which does not include Ukraine, is in theory of no help. This is undoubtedly the calculation that Vladimir Putin made: apart from a few weak sanctions, neither the Americans nor the Europeans were going to consider direct military intervention. Blinded by his hubris, he thought he had a free hand to shamelessly invade a territory larger than France.
However, he didn’t count upon the incredible resistance of the Ukrainian people and the enormous indignation that this invasion aroused throughout the world. The West, thought to be disunited, put their national interests on the back burner and agreed to strike Russia, whichever way they could. The Germans, who have so much to lose in this war because of their strong dependence on Russia, have turned their backs on seventy years of non-intervention to offer massive military aid to Ukraine. The European Union, which was said to be virtually impotent, is now speaking with one voice and has imposed drastic financial sanctions, which will deeply destabilize the Russian economy. Even China and India do not support Moscow directly, while Turkey has condemned (but not sanctioned) the Russian invasion.
In this tragedy, is there any reason for hope? Putin could well end up as a pariah, condemning his population, already muzzled by the authorities and fed by nationalist propaganda, to isolation, which could lead to a major internal destabilization for the regime. This would be one of the greatest paradoxes of this unprecedented crisis: if its outcome remains uncertain, it has already created a breach in Putin's power. And it has succeeded in uniting all Europeans against the one who is now their common enemy.