
March 20, 2018
Colored portrait of Czeslawa Kwoka, 1943 (©Marina Amaral/Wilhelm Brasse)
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Colored portrait of Czeslawa Kwoka, 1943 (©Marina Amaral/Wilhelm Brasse)
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French President Emmanuel Macron is making a point of keeping an open dialogue with Putin, hoping to avoid a world war at all costs. But he needs to get his historical comparisons (and world wars) in order.
A poster in protest of Russian President Vladimir Putin. French President Emmanuel Macron has previously called for the need to not humiliate Putin, but some are calling it the wrong move.
-Analysis-
PARIS — “I know Putin well. We should not be hoping for him to leave: whoever is likely to succeed him will be much worse.”
Stay up-to-date with the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war, with our exclusive international coverage.
Sign up to our free daily newsletter.This is what former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said to me in 2017, while we were in New York. He was trying to moderate my growing hostility towards the Kremlin’s leader. In fact, in the same sentence, he wanted to also reassure me about the United States President Donald Trump, who had just come into the room: “He may be unpredictable, but he is not an ideologue.”
While the war rages on in Ukraine and continues to evoke World War I trenches for some military analysts, Kissinger’s words on Putin come back to me. And even more so now that French president Emmanuel Macron seems to behave like a disciple of Kissinger, a man who did not hide his admiration for Bismarck's realpolitik of excluding morals and ethics from decisions.
By emphasizing the need to "not humiliate" and isolate Russia, Kissinger and Macron have the wrong priorities. The focus is elsewhere. It is to avoid at all costs that the "crime pays," that the aggressor is rewarded. In other words, preventing the defeat of Ukraine is more important (especially in the long term for the stability of the world order) than preventing Putin’s humiliation.
We live in a world where words and nuances are more important than ever. Wanting to prevent the defeat of Ukraine is not exactly the same as having the defeat of Russia as a goal. It is not the country that we want to belittle and humiliate, but its leader with whom we want to set the necessary boundaries. And this goal cannot be achieved through dialogue with Moscow, but by creating a stronger balance of power between Russia and Ukraine.
How, in this context, do we explain the diplomatic approach and search for dialogue with Moscow at any cost, favored by Paris? Beyond pride, one can legitimately wonder about the philosophical, cultural, geopolitical, political or other motivations that explain the choices of a diplomat who has objectively isolated Paris from the majority of European and Western capitals.
Beyond the concerns expressed by Kissinger (that the alternatives to Putin would be worst), there are those formulated by Jürgen Habermas. Europe, as well as everyone else, knows that the German philosopher is a supporter of the European cause (and cannot imagine its future without maintaining some form of link with Russia).
Habermas articulates a very "German" preoccupation, analyzing the geographical, historical and cultural proximity between Berlin and Moscow, without forgetting the specific weight of guilt and remorse linked to World War II.
By continuing to emphasize the importance of the Franco-German couple, has Macron, in his relationship with Russia, become more "German" than the Germans themselves? In a more classic sense, doesn’t the rapport between France and America, as well as a certain Gaullist tradition (concerned with protecting France's diplomatic independence) further explain the particular relationship between Paris and Moscow? The interests of Paris are not the same the ones as Washington. And even more so now that America has become unpredictable despite its newfound firmness, at least in appearance, on the issue of Ukraine.
Russian embassy in Berlin, Germany, during a pro-Ukraine demonstration on June 19.
Omer Messinger/ZUMA
There is one more interpretation, which is more philosophical and historical. The French president is concerned about the multiple historical analogies that may exist between the current situation and the conditions that prevailed at the beginning of World War I. Does he intend to do whatever it takes to ensure that the world does not go into a third world war, a potentially nuclear one?
Without being too controversial, one may nevertheless wonder if Macron, legitimately obsessed with the First World War and the risks of a third one, is not overlooking a third unavoidable historical comparison: the Second World War?
And to be more precise, with a parallel that can no longer be summarily dismissed as too extreme: Putin and Hitler?
What does it mean to not humiliate and isolate Putin? In order to grasp the full vanity of this ambition, it would be enough to refer to the "Diary of an Embassy in Berlin," written by one of the French diplomats who was among the first to perceive the "specificity" of Hitler, Ambassador André François-Poncet.
The idea that one could seek compromises with Hitler and Putin would undoubtedly have amused him. Now, Macron can argue that he has done everything to avoid the worst. But does he really have the same cards at his disposal as Turkey does to present himself as an intermediary between Russia and Ukraine?
Doesn't France risk appearing as an illustration of the growing divisions to come within the Western camp on the issue of Ukraine? But to get to the heart of the matter, it is not the Western camp that is primarily responsible for the humiliation of Russia. It is Putin himself.
French President Emmanuel Macron is making a point of keeping an open dialogue with Putin, hoping to avoid a world war at all costs. But he needs to get his historical comparisons (and world wars) in order.
Attacks in Ukraine's second biggest city are reminiscent of strategy in Mariupol.
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Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.