To close Vladimir Putin’s difficult week came the words of American President Joe Biden, who warned him against using chemical or nuclear weapons on the Ukrainian front: “Don’t do it, don’t do it – he said in an interview. yesterday at CBS imagining to contact him directly -. If I did, the face of war would change ». The US president did not go into the details of what the US response could be if the nuclear event arises, but assured: “It would be consequential.” Not to mention the fact that such a decision would make Putin and Russia “even more pariah in the world“.
Since the Pentagon has not yet identified elements that suggest a nuclear evolution of the conflict – at most the hypothesis circulated in military circles is that of a possible use of atomic short-range tactics – Biden’s words actually go to to sign the state of affairs on the battlefield. In fact, since June, with the decision to send high-mobility artillery missile systems to Kiev and to enhance training on the use of the new instrumentation, the axis of fighting has definitely shifted in favor of the Ukrainian side. And this had a domino effect on Russia’s situation of political isolation, which was blatantly staged at the Samarkand summit on 15 and 16 September.
Here the Asian giants present – in particular China and India – did not spend themselves in support of Vladimir Putin in the way he expected, and although the official Russian press service has minimized the differences, the consensus recovery mission cannot be said to be successful. .
Among the details leaked at the end of the summit, there are the expectations to which the Russian president was subjected before the start of the various bilateral meetings. Gone are the times when he was allowed to show up at least forty-five minutes late or to make his guests wait in grueling anterooms. This time the merciless shots of the Uzbek ceremonial, which organized the summit, portrayed him alone, in front of an empty chair, waiting for the leaders of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to arrive to shake his hand. The Central Asian republics are those that have expressed the greatest concern to China about the consequences of the war in Ukraine: they fear that they will be the successive victims of the imperialist manias of the Kremlin and they do not feel more secure in their policies of defense and control of the territory. . Erdogan also kept him waiting for several minutes, and relations with Turkey also cooled due to tensions in the South Caucasus. Azerbaijan’s attack on Armenia would probably not have occurred in the presence of an undiminished Russia on the Ukrainian front that had been able to oversee the security of Yerevan. Erdogan has made no secret of the differences that have also been registered on the question of Northern Cyprus and on the supply of fertilizers and foodstuffs from Ukraine, which affect all trade in the Black Sea.
But the greatest embarrassments were recorded with India and China, which are among other things divided on different dossiers – from the control of the spheres of influence in Central Asia to those of the Indo-Pacific – but which found themselves in harmony precisely in the assessment of the war in Ukraine: “This is not the time for war,” said Modi; “I understand China’s concerns,” Putin was forced to reply to Xi in the face of the Chinese reasoning on the importance of a peaceful world. The return to Moscow therefore took place under the sign of great weakness, and the risk for him now is that there will also be a drastic collapse of internal consensus. In the independent press and in the most popular Telegram channels, memes and videos are starting to accumulate that ridicule the loneliness of the Russian president. And more and more articles are beginning to be read that question the modalities of an impeachment of the president. The examples that tried to remove Boris Yeltsin between 1993 and 1999 are highly cited. But they all failed.