Vladimir Putin turned 70 this Friday (7) with a gift from the Norwegian Nobel Committee. By anointing antiKremlin regime forces with the prestigious Peace Prize laureate, organizers have symbolically sealed the Russian president as a pet outcast of the West.
Putin doesn’t care, on the contrary: it’s great for his rhetoric of walling Russia in a hostile world that he sees the West hailing antigovernment activists. Of course in a context in which he equates his regime with the nation.
In the infamous speech last Friday (30th) ordering the annexation of four territories in Ukraine that he does not fully control, the President delivered his entire litany of criticism of a group of countries he calls the United States subservient to states in Europe that ultimately aim to thwart Russian freedom and bury their historical legacy.
The problem for Putin is that his rhetoric is echoing through the increasingly fragile walls of an elite increasingly opposed to the course of the Ukraine war. Less for breaking the Budapest Memorandum, in which Moscow recognized, among other things, the exSoviet borders of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan in 1994.
But there are public signs of dissatisfaction with the war and Russia’s international isolation. It’s good to be clear: the calls are for a more violent war rather than immediate peace. The political lane seems pretty narrow for Putin, who has always ruled through division and Darwinian struggle between elite factions.
In that sense, the awards given by Putin’s rivals to those unhappy with the jailing of their yachts and foreign accounts only confirm that their world will never go back to February 23, the eve of the invasion. For the hard line, it’s confirmation that it’s time to double down.
Also significant for the award is the selection of activists from the triad of countries of origin of the former Kievan Rus’, keepers of the common linguistic, religious and historical heritage. The Minsk dictatorship has evolved from a malleable ally of Putin to his vassal, and Ukraine is under aggression. In both cases, the central motivation is geopolitical, to regain strategic depth between the world’s largest country and Europe.
In particular, the election of Memorial, a human rights NGO founded in the closing years of the communist empire and dissolved by the courts last year. The historical role of his performance, from supporting imprisoned dissidents to defending gay rights in Chechnya, is enormous.
It is the second shot at Putin in two years after the 2021 award of journalist Dmitri Muratov, who saw his newspaper Novaia Gazeta become a digital refugee banned from operating on Russian soil.
After all, the Nobel Peace Prize demonstrated a cunning that is not known in other editions, for example when Barack Obama was honored in his first year in office he would not have deserved the prize even after eight years in the White House.
The committee escaped the trap of rewarding Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the controversial Ukrainian president who became a hero in the West for his tenacious, USarmed resistance to the Russian invasion. If he were the laureate, the leader’s years of corruption and authoritarian practices would be washed away.
Zelensky marked his tenure up to the war with vacillating politics, persecution of the opposition, and introduction of the Ukrainian language among the Russianspeaking population. Of course, he didn’t commit the genocide that Putin accused him of, but he wasn’t exactly welcome in the east and south of the country.
The Ukrainian leader is viewed with suspicion even in the West because, according to available reports, he is not trusted, does not share his military decisions with those who support them in practice and acts impulsively. But that is what we have today, and his bravery in resistance is enough to justify the moral position of Washington and its allies.
Also, the contradiction would be to make a man in arms a Nobel Peace Prize winner who the day before asked NATO (Western military alliance) to attack Russia before Putin uses a nuclear warhead against the Ukrainians and ignores World War III. that such an act would bring about what President Joe Biden called “Armageddon” that same day.
It makes more sense to reward an NGO dedicated to investigating war crimes attributed to the Russians, as well as a more unpredictable figure like Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski, imprisoned by the dictatorship of Aleksandr Lukachenko.