All day Friday, September 30, faces lit up with beatific smiles, Russian TV journalists counted down to the joyous "historic event," a "moment of national unity and celebration" comparable to the "incorporation" of Crimea into Russia in 2014.
The officials (MPs, senators, governors, generals, religious dignitaries) who gradually took their seats in the large St. George's Hall of the Kremlin kept repeating the word "happiness," telling the interviewers how emotional they were to experience such an exceptional moment. They were referring to the moment when nearly 100,000 km2 of Ukrainian land, taken by force, was added to the Russian Federation's territory.
Then Vladimir Putin arrived and, in a 40-minute speech full of resentment, sometimes apocalyptic, sometimes messianic, he derailed this well-oiled mechanism.
Of course, the Russian president fulfilled the most important part of the proceedings, signing, along with the pro-Russian leaders of the four regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, the document that puts paid to any prospect of a negotiated peace with Ukraine and plunges the planet into the unknown. Of course, Mr. Putin welcomed the referendums held in these regions a few days earlier. Of course, he tried to give this annexation a veneer of legality, referring to the United Nations Charter, a few hours before Russia vetoed the UN resolution condemning this takeover. Of course, he repeated his usual refrain about the illegitimacy of the Ukrainian state and, in passing, the illegitimacy of the dissolution of the Soviet Union (USSR).
Violent diatribe against the West
But the Russian president spent just a few minutes doing all this, choosing to devote the bulk of his speech to an exceptionally violent diatribe against the West. "They" and "them" were the most frequent words in the speech, and its real focus. "Them" being the West, guilty of a "centuries-old Russophobia" and still seeking to destabilize and dismember Russia, and to make it into a "colony."
"They cannot accept the idea that there is such a large country, with such natural wealth and resources, a people who do not know how to submit," he said, continuing: "Our development and prosperity threaten them. (...) They refuse to accept that we are a free society, and want to see us as a crowd of soulless slaves."
Mr. Putin's list of grievances did not end there. According to him, "Russia understands its responsibility before the world community." His speech pretended to have a universal reach. Accordingly, the West is guilty of slavery, of plundering of India and Africa, of the genocide of the American Indians, and also of the "perversions that lead to degradation and extinction," such as the possibility of "choosing one's gender." He added that "Such a reversal of faith and traditional values, such a suppression of freedom has the characteristics of an inverted religion, of pure and simple Satanism."
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