Alone Against All: The Beginning of Putin’s End

This article is published in number 10 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until March 7, 2022

Frozen skies, frozen accounts, hunt for oligarchs and aid to Ukraine: Europe and the West have rediscovered an unexpected geographical and political unity. Perhaps even greater than during the Cold War. In the decades of confrontation across the Wall, in a world split in two, a code of interaction had been worked out, but the bombs on Ukrainian cities still asleep at dawn last week turned Russia into an international outlaw. Within hours, all the traditions of European politics, from Swedish neutrality to German and Italian pacifism, were overturned. Europe shaken by fear of enlargement and waves of refugees has opened its arms to Ukraine under attack, the internal fractures of the countries have been healed in unprecedented solidarity, while a strange alliance, composed of NATO, by hackers of Anonymous, from the UN and from the great international entrepreneurs, confirmed the sentence of the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “We are on the right side of history”.

The slow descent towards Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship had put the Western world in difficulty, splitting it even internally with respect to the prospects of “illiberal democracy”, with Moscow turning from the capital of the radiant future of the left to the beacon of right-wing sovereignties. Some hoped for a moderate evolution towards a European model, others for a democratic revolution, all for a peaceful development: from the 1990s onwards, the West had often closed its eyes on the actions of the Kremlin, to avoid its greatest nightmare, a Yugoslavia multiplied by one hundred. The result was only to postpone it, and perhaps the prompt reaction to the Ukrainian tragedy – from discussions on a package of decorative sanctions to the dispatch of weapons, in a few hours – is also the realization that they have been too cautious, with respect to Putin’s openly declared neo-imperial and nationalist aims, to human rights violations, to wars in Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, Syria.

Thirty years after the end of the USSR, Putin’s war against Ukraine is a tail, marking the definitive implosion of the empire, and the failure of Russia’s transition from dictatorship to democracy and back. Moscow did not want to acknowledge that it was defeated in the Cold War, ending up against the united world, with the great Asian allies China and India sharing in large part its hostility towards the West, but not its desire to go to the clash. We are facing the beginning of the end of an historical era. It remains to be seen whether this will be the occasion to begin, this time in earnest, the construction of a post-imperial Russia, democratic and respectful of others, without which security on the European continent (and beyond) will always remain incomplete.

Anna Zafesova, journalist, expert on Russia, signature of de The print. In 2021 you published Navalny vs. Putin (Countries Editions).

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