The “niet” to the US proposals appeared on the website of the Foreign Ministry and then corrected. The sovereign wing wants war but the oligarchs do not: they would lose too much from sanctions
The Russian “niet” to the American negotiation proposals makes the Moscow Stock Exchange tremble, which returns to plummet with the new signs of war, and then immediately disappears – literally – from circulation, with the site of the Russian Foreign Ministry collapsing immediately after and remains inaccessible for hours. From the Stalinist skyscraper on Smolenskaya Square come subdued justifications for a “technical problem”, without even bringing up the hypothesis of cyberwares and Ukrainian hackers. An embarrassing moment for the ambitions of a country that wants to return to be recognized as a superpower, which suggests a misunderstanding of the providential server to buy time: when the Russian diplomacy website is back online, hours later, the “response” document drops in low in the news list, and above all it changes its title: it becomes an anonymous «Press release», downgraded from that of the official response to a comment on a text yet to be published.
Perhaps a “technical” correction: many observers were in fact immediately struck by a very polemical language, more journalistic than diplomatic, with accusations against the US such as those of having “turned over” (in quotation marks in the text) the Russian proposals to make them more “comfortable “. Or perhaps an attempt to remedy a cartridge fired too soon, in a day that abounds with contradictory signals from the Kremlin, from the expulsion of the American vice-ambassador to the new accusations of “genocide” by the Russians against the Ukrainians, to the rain of mortars and bombs along the front line in the Donbass.
Random or intentional, the yellow of the Russian diplomacy website is symptomatic of this war fought on the media even before in the snow and mud on the border with Ukraine. The Russian channels show tanks taken away from Crimea and trains loaded with armored vehicles resuming the way back, to deny the Pentagon’s accusations of the absence of tangible signs of the retreat promised by Vladimir Putin. A promise also made by the television screens, as well as the meticulously organized scenography of the preparations: first the Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov who suggests giving the negotiation a chance, and then that of Defense Sergey Shoigu who communicates the return of the troops to the base from the “exercises” to the West. The Russian president appears worried and doubtful, he demands reassurance from the ministers, before reassuring in turn – always in front of the cameras – Olaf Scholz, guaranteeing that “he does not want a war in Europe”.
An exhibition that cannot hide the signal that, at least in terms of media escalation, it was Putin who had to reassure and deny, just the day before the date of the invasion of Ukraine announced to American newspapers by “well-informed Western sources” . There is no doubt that his courtiers have noticed this. The “Ukrainian campaign” was in fact largely directed at them, to re-propose the Russian leader as irreplaceable in times of “geopolitical” confrontation, in view of the 2024 elections. In fact, it is no coincidence that the ultimatum on the stop to NATO was published on the usual website of the Foreign Ministry in the form of a draft treaty to be signed or rejected, a document designed to be rejected, offering the pretext for one of those escalations from which the head of the Kremlin has always earned so far. Today, however, even its voters appear in the polls terrified by a hypothesis of war, while in the Ukrainian polls the supporters of NATO membership increase to 62%, a result opposite to what they hoped in Moscow.
Putin’s dilemma therefore remains unsolvable: his post-imperial worldview does not allow him to resign himself to a Ukraine fleeing Russia into the arms of the West, but the invasion has too high a price for everyone, first of all. his own followers. Even the text published by the Foreign Ministry yesterday bears the signs of the same ambivalence: it applauds the “potential for an agreement” with the United States on disarmament, but at the same time stubbornly reaffirms all Russian positions on Crimea, Donbass and NATO. It could be a speech made to the mother-in-law because the daughter-in-law intends, but the existence of a possible clash within the Kremlin can only be guessed from indirect signals even more ambiguous than those sent by the Politburò in Brezhnev’s time. Compromise has never been an art in which Putinism has shone. Achieving and / or imposing it will not be easy.
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