Vanessa Voisin

Quali sono gli obiettivi della guerra di Putin contro l’Ucraina?

Excerpts:

In their articles, speeches and editorials, the Kremlin’s mouthpieces build the notion of the war against Ukraine as a fundamentally defensive, protective and preventive endeavor. Moreover, they toy with historical precedents and international legal frameworks to claim the righteousness of the invasion. This narrative is organized along three main threads: the resistance to US hegemony, the necessity to restore Russian historico-spatial unity, and Russia’s duty to save its existence from the corrosion of alien values.

It seems highly plausible that the president of the Russian Federation partly believes this mental construction, a little like Stalin had when he commented that even if only 5% of the suspicions and denunciations were authentic, they were worth the Great Terror, because they sufficed to threaten the existence of the system (Nérard, 2004). As Alberto Masoero observed, “there is a utopian-religious dimension in Putin’s self-representations that escapes understanding in terms of conservative realism […] We therefore have to ask ourselves whether the war does not signal the need to bring attention to politics also in its dimension of faith at the center of historiographical research, a belief not necessarily supported by objective data” (Masoero, 2022, pp. 712, 713).

Once again in Russian and Soviet history, the authorities have tried to find a “usable past” and usable identity markers (Brandenberger, 2002 and 2015). But this time the Russian Federation as a geopolitical power does not possess the strongest assets – militarily, culturally, in terms of prestige, or even demographically. In search of this hook on which to hang its national pride and the regime’s legitimacy, the Kremlin muses again with imperial sirens, with the idea that Russia does not have clearly bound limits to its civilizational pretenses. It may be on this specific point that the plans of the elites meet the dreams and wishes of the ordinary citizen

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(pubblicato su gentile concessione dell’editore, da: F. Zannoni e D. Gladun, a cura di, “Ukrainians Feeing the War. Stories and Studies in Reception Contexts”, Bologna, Clueb, 2024, pp-15-38)