The Russian strategy resumes the nuclear chant, and forgets General Kutuzov

Odessa, from our envoy. Thursday. The Russian army has unleashed one of the most massive bombing raids on cities since the beginning of the war. The eighth, for squandering missiles and rockets and drones, according to the ranking of the Ukrainian defense: more than 120 missiles in the morning alone. Flak intercepted most of them. There have been major new damages to the electricity supply in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv and many other cities. At least two missiles also fell on Odessa, one towards the Usatovo power station, the other in the industrial area of ​​the port near the Peresyp railway station. The interruptions of the electricity grid and the internet have multiplied, but once again the city shows that it lives as if a life like this could become normal. I was walking in the downtown park this morning and, perhaps from the fresh memory of the visit to the steps, I was struck by the sight of a lady, a grandmother, who was sitting on the bench and pushing the pram back and forth with her granddaughter , why he would fall asleep or why he would not wake up, and meanwhile the alarm siren was sounding. So the Ukrainian people.

And the Russians? We owe the incomparable legacy of Leo Tolstoy our admiration for General Kutuzov, his head smashed by bullets, his right eye blinded and watery, his sty, Odessa and Ismail taken from the Turks, in the name of Catherine. And then, with Alexander I, her invention: “patience and time”, the retreat, which his colleagues and rivals and the tsar himself took as an outrage, going straight to the defeat of Austerlitz. In disgrace, Kutuzov was recalled and crushed the Ottoman army, or rather he let frost, famine and cholera crush it. New misfortune, and new call, this time to face Napoleon’s army. Falling asleep in the meetings of the general staff, retiring, and leaving him as a poisoned gift Moscow destined for flames.

Kutuzov’s name would make a glorious comeback in WWII. Putin and the strategists of February 24, authors of a regrettable Napoleonic parody on Kyiv had forgotten it. With parts reversed, Ukrainian special forces paid dearly for Russian incursion of attack helicopters and transport planes and special troops of hundreds of paratroopers at Hostomel airport, and other special troops in Ukrainian uniform infiltrated Kyiv, who were supposed to liquidate Zelensky and his. Overnight the Russians had lost the war. Months later, after the sensational Ukrainian counter-offensives in the Kharkiv region and in Kherson, the new Russian military command seemed to recover the lesson of the retreat, but in a vile and defamatory version.

Far from making their territory a scorched earth for the Ukrainian counter-offensive, the Russians have compensated for the inglorious retreat with the strategy, if anyone has the audacity to call it that, of the indiscriminate bombing of cities, houses, civilian buildings, hospitals, energy plants and hydraulic and transport infrastructures: the strategy of destruction. Something the “second army of the world” will have to be ashamed of from now on. And he should have been ashamed of it first, in the ten years in Afghanistan, in the years of the two Chechen wars, in that of Georgia, Crimea and then Syria, except that there the rest of the world turned a blind eye, unlike Kutuzov. This shameless Russian regime can only repeat the nuclear weapon song every day. Yesterday Putin praised the inauguration of a new nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed submarine, named after Tsar Alexander III, and the construction of four more, which will make Russia safe “for decades to come”. So he thinks he will last, he and the planet: he has reassured us. He was already thinking of lasting when he called the ridiculous referendums in Zaporizhia and Kherson, proclaimed Russian territory “for eternity”. I read that he also said that Russia “will prepare the sailors taking into account the experience gained during the special military operation in Ukraine”: a Christmas letter must have finally arrived, stamped with the stamp of Moskva and the middle finger.