Category: VIEWS

One does not understand the disagreement. One does not understand why it is necessary to bring together the representatives of the 27 Member States on Monday, since the question is so simple. If we Europeans wish to contribute to the success of the mobilisation decreed by Vladimir Putin, we close our borders to the would-be deserters. Since we do not want this and, on the contrary, want as many young Russians as possible to refuse to take part in the aggression against Ukraine, we open our borders to them.

Russia has no more allies. It still has Syria, Nicaragua, Belarus, Cuba, Eritrea and North Korea, which, like itself, tried to prevent the Ukrainian president from addressing the UN General Assembly via a screen, but what about China? India? Turkey? Kazakhstan and the other Central Asian states?

Perhaps we will stop hearing that there is no change possible in the Kremlin. All the world’s Russologists, or almost all of them have been saying and pounding on it since 24 February, but faced with the victories won by the Ukrainians, faced with the breakthrough towards Donestk that the recapture of Kupiansk and Izium now allows them to make, perhaps they will come to realise that the time for reckoning is inevitably approaching.

What if it were simple? What if there was actually no difficulty in explaining how and why a distant successor to Stalin gave his people and all of Central Europe the gift of freedom, brought us out of the Cold War without war, and retired from power, of his own free will, rather than using the military to prevent the dismantling of the former Russian Empire which became the Soviet Union?

The terraces are crowded. By late afternoon, the green spaces are too. Evenings and mornings, commuters create the same traffic jams as everywhere else. Nothing differentiates Kiev from any other European capital and yet everything is different, but what exactly differs?