Chronic. The extreme violence and assumed brutality of the ongoing offensive in Ukraine have led many commentators, and even decision-makers, to question the mental balance of Vladimir Putin, described as “crazy” or of “paranoid”. It is to obscure the analysis unnecessarily at a time when the tragedy requires lucidity more than ever. The important thing is therefore less to denigrate than to try to understand the springs of a rationality which may legitimately seem foreign to us, but which is nonetheless animated by a profound logic. Once again, the Syrian crisis could have provided an analytical grid for all those who have neglected it for too long as a theater “secondary” in relation to a Europe adorned alone with the strategic dimension.
Vladimir Assad
The unconditional support that Vladimir Poutine brings to Bashar Al-Assad, from the beginning, in Syria, in March 2011, of a pacifist dispute, cannot be explained simply by geopolitical considerations. The two leaders indeed share a broadly comparable vision of the world, forged by the political police whose obsidional culture has permanently impregnated them, Putin as an officer of the late KGB, Al-Assad as a product of the “mukhabarates”, these intelligence services which have power of life or death over Syrian men and women. This opaque world where Putin and Assad were formed generates its own “alternative reality” where the people have no existence, replaced as they are by “color revolutions”, themselves the result of the supposed manipulations of Western services. Where the democratic opposition is elated, Al-Assad and Putin see only a bunch of “terrorists”for the first, or of “Nazis”for the second, which it is important to liquidate.
This refusal of any form of dialogue, going as far as the desire to annihilate the slightest critical voice, is also nourished by the status of heir which falls to both Al-Assad and Putin. The latter was officially designated by Boris Yeltsin, the first president of post-Soviet Russia, as his successor in the Kremlin, of which he served as interim director from the first days of 2000, before being elected president in May, with officially 52.5% of the votes. Bashar succeeds the following month to his deceased father, Hafez Al-Assad, absolute master of Syria since 1970, this dynastic succession being validated by a presidential ballot with a single candidate, with officially 99.7% of positive votes. The two heirs are not only determined to defend the regime they now lead at all costs, they both nurture nostalgia for a previous order, where, for Putin, democratic Ukraine did not challenge Russian authoritarianism and where , for Al-Assad, the power of the USSR compensated that of the United States. The Syrian despot has hailed the invasion of Ukraine as a “editing the storywith restoration of the international balance, broken since the fall of the Soviet Union”.
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