Putin courts global far right in Russian Security Council address

The Spider’s Web operation was aimed at Russian aircraft used daily by the Kremlin regime to bomb peaceful Ukrainian towns and villages.

It was believed that during this expanded meeting with permanent members of the Security Council, as well as invited guests, Putin would outline how he planned to take revenge on the neighboring state. However, in reality, no such event took place. Instead, Putin chose to speak virtually with the permanent members of the Security Council of the Russian Federation about Russia’s role as a preserver of traditional values.

It was Secretary of the Security Council, Sergei Shoigu, who confirmed that this was indeed the agenda of the meeting. After the session, he promised to follow all of Putin’s directives regarding the protection of these traditional values, which are now even enshrined in the Russian Constitution.

This entire conversation about values, liberal totalitarianism, and Russia preserving the past looked, to put it mildly, blasphemous against the backdrop of the attack on Ukraine on the night of June 10. As is known, that attack damaged Saint Sophia Cathedral.

Just imagine: barbarians destroying one of the key elements of the oldest Orthodox church, linked to the history of Kyivan Rus and princely dynasties. They also damaged the historic Odesa Film Studio, which holds great significance for the history of both past and contemporary cinema.

And then, just a few hours after this destruction, they hold a Security Council meeting where the supreme commander-in-chief of this barbaric army, a man directly responsible for the destruction of churches, monuments, the bombing of museums and libraries, talks about preserving traditional values.

Of course, this may seem completely absurd and only serves to highlight that Putin has no genuinely new tools for escalating the war against Ukraine, not because those tools don’t exist, but because he uses them daily. He was using them even before Operation Spider’s Web.

And it’s not this operation that caused Putin to continue terrorizing Kyiv, Odesa, and other peaceful Ukrainian cities. It’s because terror tactics are a natural strategy for the Russian state and for this war, which Russia has been waging for decades against the civilized world.

The war between barbarism and civilization, which we once read about in history textbooks, looks exactly like this. The only difference is that barbarian chieftains in the past didn’t hold Security Council meetings to discuss the protection of traditional values. Or perhaps they did, only back then there was no television or internet, and no one to record their cynical speeches delivered to their subordinates in the pauses between killings and rapes.

Yet this meeting should still be taken seriously, and here’s why: it also represents an appeal by the Russian leader to the far-right world, which is gaining more and more power in the civilized West.

Many supporters of far-right, post-fascist, and post-Nazi ideologies view Russia as the obvious successor to Hitler’s Reich, specifically in terms of values, and as the clear heir to Mussolini’s fascism.

For Putin, it’s crucial to demonstrate that this is indeed the case. That despite all his rhetoric about being a great fighter against “fascists” in Ukraine, he is in fact the embodiment of the spirit of the Soviet Chekists’ idol —  Adolf Hitler. Yes, they occasionally mention how “great” another thug and murderer, Joseph Stalin, was, but believe me, these people hold far more respect for Hitler.

If Putin were asked, without any television cameras, whom he would like to emulate, he would clearly say Adolf Hitler. And Putin’s ally, Alexander Lukashenko, has never even tried to hide this aspiration. After being elected president of Belarus, he openly spoke about how much good he believed there was in the actions of the Führer of the Third Reich.

These are, so to speak, documented facts that reveal the true priorities of these scoundrels. And in this context, of course, Putin is holding this meeting not only, and not primarily, for the Russian audience.

Russians are of no interest to the Russian leader at all, because he knows that a passive and resistance-free society will accept any ideological direction. If Putin tells Russians tomorrow to march under swastikas, they will gladly raise their arms in salute in every street and square across Russian cities, and will insist that Russia has always been a haven of Hitlerism.

But what matters to Putin is that the West believes it. He wants to continue his productive dialogue with activists and leaders of far-right political movements — people who influence Western solidarity with Ukraine, as well as Ukraine’s European and Euro-Atlantic integration.

The very Russian-Ukrainian war is fueling fears about the possibility of military conflict spreading to the European continent, which includes NATO and EU member states.

We see the uncertainty present in the sentiments of many Western citizens. And Putin wants to exploit all of this to send a message: “If you choose far-right allies who are willing to reach an understanding with the Kremlin, you have nothing to worry about. There will be no war on your soil. But if you vote for totalitarian liberals (a phrase — my God, who even writes this stuff for him), then of course, after years of war in Ukraine and the destruction of Ukrainian statehood, the Russian army will come to you too, with new bloody crimes.”

And that, essentially, is the true meaning of the Security Council meeting held virtually by the Führer of the Russian Federation.

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About the author. Vitaly Portnikov, journalist, laureate of the Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine.

The editorial team does not always share the opinions expressed by blog or column authors.