Putin’s closed circle

Faced with the tragedy of Mariupol, the same question has come up every day since the beginning of this war: who will stop Vladimir Putin?

Are there no checks and balances – we dare not speak of safeguards – within the Russian government apparatus that could stop this headlong rush?

Clearly, the head of the Kremlin is primarily responsible for this conflict, which he planned and decided on long ago. 

But his solitude is only relative. In his relentlessness against the Ukrainians, he is being encouraged by a few men who want to please him so they can hold on to their positions.

To look at Putin's entourage is to realize that the plan to invade Ukraine is the fruit of a slow decay, that of a system of government that has ossified around a few rancid and perfectly anachronistic ideas.

This generation, for whom the first part of their career came to an abrupt end at the turn of the 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union, cultivates nostalgia for Russian greatness and justifies its aggressive policy by the "humiliations" that the West supposedly inflicted on their country the past three decades. 

In its drifting, the clan has come to believe its own lies, to the point of having committed serious errors of judgment.

Informed by services that are subservient to him, Putin has underestimated the spirit of resistance of the young Ukrainian nation, which has been standing up to him for almost a month.

It is unfortunate that he has found an ally in the person of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow. Although the head of the Russian Orthodox Church is not part of the government, he always gravitates towards this closed circle.

And by putting his religious authority at the service of unbridled nationalism, Kirill has given Putin and his supporters ideological ammunition.

Jérôme Chapuis is the editor-in-chief of La Croix.