Tanks or no tanks? In Berlin, Paris and Washington, the decision to deliver heavy weapons to Ukraine has still not been taken. The arguments put forward by the “no” camp are not lacking: fear of a nuclear response, fear of a collapse of the Putin regime – which could bring to power an even more diabolical dictator -, even of a break-up of the country. , with the risk of confrontations between provinces equipped with the atomic force.
However, let us pose the problem differently: who has an interest in anchoring these visions of the apocalypse in people’s minds, if not Putin himself? “The fear he arouses instills in Westerners the idea that the situation will get worse if he disappears. But that’s not true! If he disappears, the source of this fear will disappear with him”, objects the Ukrainian philosopher Constantin Sigov. So let’s put aside for a moment this rhetoric that serves as Putin’s life insurance and allows him to continue his sinister project of enslavement, to try to imagine a future without him.
First, this postulate: dictatorship is not inevitable, even in Russia. “Before the Bolshevik revolution, the municipalities showed initiative, underlines the historian Françoise Thom. The regional assemblies set up by Alexander II were thus a success. Another Russia is possible, the “democracy of small spaces”, as said [l’écrivain dissident] Solzhenitsyn.”
A new, decentralized governance would give less power to the imperial center of the country, Moscow. Could Putin have embarked on this absurd and costly adventure if he had had to justify it to powerful regional leaders? Probably not.
It is too early to imagine an “after”. But we don’t have to assume the “worst”. Giving heavy weapons to the Ukrainians would help them take a decisive step, one that would drive Putin’s army from their lands. And would perhaps also cause this tectonic shock which, from Rostov to Vladivostok, would give the Russian soul the opportunity to redeem itself. To rise from the moral mire into which the tyrant Putin plunged her.
