The French presidency detailed the contents of the March 3 phone call between Vladimir Putin and Emmanuel Macron, his privileged interlocutor in the West. The strangest aspect, in a conversation that leaves no room for the prospect of an end to this atrocious war, is that the Russian president privately supports the same position he is flaunting in public. Let me explain.
We could also understand that the head of an authoritarian regime “sells” a fanciful version of reality to his people, to convince them of the goodness of war. In this case the narrative is that of a Nazi regime that with the support of the West would threaten Russia. Nobody believes that the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskii is infested with Nazis, even if the Nazis exist in Ukraine as well as in Russia. However, the role of propaganda is to make people believe the unlikely.
On the other hand, the fact that in a meeting he himself sought with a foreign head of state Putin repeats the same crude propaganda is surprising. Putin cannot think for a second that Macron, who personally knows Zelenskii, could believe that the former Jewish comedian is at the helm of a Nazi regime. According to the Elysée, the French president responded to Putin with a sharp sentence: “You lie to yourself”.
Psychological warfare
According to a hypothesis that has been circulating for some time, the Russian president would be disconnected from reality and would have ended up believing in his own propaganda. The causes of this detachment would be Putin’s isolation (accentuated by the covid) and the nature of his power, highlighted by the way he treats senior officials on TV. Another possibility is that this obstinacy is part of psychological warfare and that Putin wants to appear extremist, if not out of control, therefore extremely dangerous.
But this explanation is not enough. The reality is that Ukraine is at the center of a carefully constructed discourse, endlessly repeated in order to transform itself into an “alternative reality”.
An example comes from a mistake made by the Russian news agency Ria Novosti, which prematurely published online a text intended to be circulated after the victory over Ukraine. The document was promptly withdrawn, but the magic of the internet does not allow anything to disappear. It is necessary to read these words, translated into French by the Foundation for Political Innovation, to grasp the implications.
First of all, from the text we learn that the “victory” celebrated is based on the conquest of all of Ukraine and not only of the coastal area, and that the goal is the unification of all the Russian people, that is the people who live in Russia, in Belarus and Ukraine. Below we read that Russia experiences the war, from the very beginning, as a confrontation with the West. The celebratory text underlines that “Russia has not only challenged the West, but has shown that the era of Western world domination can be considered definitively and completely closed”.
From these sentences we understand that Putin will not hesitate to use every means available to achieve his goal, and we know well what this means when the Russian military is involved. The conclusion drawn by Emmanuel Macron is that “the worst is yet to come” and that Putin wants to conquer the whole of Ukraine. This is bad news, for Ukrainians and for the world.
(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)