Chronic. Strange coincidence? The video interview that Joe Biden and Vladimir Poutin had on Tuesday, December 7, corresponds exactly to the thirtieth anniversary of a momentous episode in the collapse of the Soviet Union, certainly marked with a black stone in the mind. of the current Russian president. In both cases, Ukraine is the center of the conversation.
On December 7, 1991, in the midst of the decomposition of the Communist Empire, three men met in a hunting lodge in the Belovej forest, in Belarus, near the Polish border. After a hunting party in -15 ° C, they warmed up with a number of glasses of vodka and, according to the confidences of one of the participants in Jan Krauze, from the World, a dinner “Consistent and emotional”.
The next day, December 8, they set to work: thus the presidents of three large republics still officially members of the USSR – Russian Boris Yeltsin, Ukrainian Leonid Kravchuk and Belarusian Stanislav Shushkievich – signed a document. noting than “The USSR ceased to exist, as a subject of international law and geopolitical reality” : it was, de facto, the death certificate of the Soviet Union. Then they informed by telephone the American president, George Bush, and the leader of this same USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev. All that remained was to bury him, which he did three weeks later by proclaiming the end of the Union.
First warning
Kravchuk, as much as Yeltsin, had been on the maneuver. A week earlier, he had organized a referendum on the independence of Ukraine, approved by more than 80% of the voters (including in Crimea). In the inexorable disintegration of the second world power, this element was decisive: without Ukraine, there could be neither the Russian Empire nor the Soviet Union.
Thirty years later, the coincidence, in reality, is not so strange. Vladimir Putin seems never to have mourned or mourned the loss of the Soviet Union, whose loss he described as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.e century, nor from Ukraine. Even though it had become independent – he was, at the time, only a collaborator of the mayor of St. Petersburg. But that she got too close to the Western camp since he was president – 2000 – and he reacts.
The “orange revolution” in 2004 was the first warning for him. When, in 2013, Kiev wanted to sign an association agreement with the European Union, it summoned the then president, Viktor Yanukovych, to oppose it. The Ukrainian people rose up, drove Yanukovych who took refuge in Russia. Vladimir Putin retaliated by annexing Crimea and intervening in Donbass in 2014. “This lightning initiative allowed him to hide the humiliating fact that Russia had just lost Ukraine”, Ivan Krastev notes in The Illiberal Moment, written with Stephen Holmes (Fayard, 2019).
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