French professor: ‘Putin adopts Goebbels-type propaganda’

The details of the recorded conversations of the German secret services between Russian soldiers in Ukraine, which were revealed the day before by the magazine der Spiegel, with horrors against the civilian population in the city of Butsa are not surprising, because Russia did the same in Syria. This is the conclusion reached by Fabrice Balance, Professor of Political Geography at the French University of Lyon 2 and a member of the Middle East Institute based in Washington.

“Putin focuses on cities first”

In an interview with Deutsche Welle, the French professor said that between 2011 and 2015, when the Russian army was not present in Syria, President Putin developed a strong diplomatic presence. He tried the reaction of the West, he used propaganda, he lied about the use of chemicals, as he does in Ukraine, in short he tried to put the West to sleep. “Then in 2015 the Russian army entered Syria and we saw a strategy by Vladimir Putin quite similar to that in Ukraine. That is, it first focused on the cities. It ‘cleared’ them of the militants just to show its strength. to make them capitulate in other areas, around the cities and in neuralgic centers.Because there are the centers of organization and logistics, there is the accumulation of wealth, there are the communication nodes And so in Ukraine we immediately saw that the Russians attacked Kyiv , in Kharkov, in Mariupol, soon in Odessa “.

Professor Balance also refers to a terror campaign in Syria, separating the militants from the civilian population. The militants hid among the population and with indiscriminate bombardments, they made the civilians flee. Those who remained were considered guerrillas and began to disappear immediately. That is, as Balance points out, Putin’s strategy in Ukraine is to separate as many people as possible from the Ukrainian army in order to defeat him more easily.

“It wants to empty Ukraine of its population”

“In Ukraine, we already have more than 4 million people who have left. Putin wants to empty Ukraine of its living potential. I think it can manage to leave up to 10 million, that is, ¼ of its population, especially This means that the men who are fighting on the front will be separated from his families. It is very difficult psychologically and this may limit their ability to resist. But that’s the Russian goal, to occupy territories by eliminating population”. The Russians, despite the evidence, both in the case of Butsa and in Krematorsk, deny the attacks on civilians, they consider that they are not bound by international treaties. Why is this happening?

“Russia is lying, it did the same in Syria, when the evidence was unshakable about the chemical attacks,” said the French professor. “Goebbels used to say that the more you lie, the bigger it gets, the more it goes on. Putin and the Russians adopt the same type of propaganda we saw even in Soviet times.”

Sandrine Blanchard

Edited by: Irini Anastassopoulou

Source: Deutsche Welle