Conflicts

Ukraine is currently conducting a special operation to take the war to the aggressor. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed this. 

In an interview with French media La Dépêche, Vera Grantseva, a political scientist and lecturer at Sciences Po in Paris, discusses Putin's reaction to the surprise attack on Ukraine, which resulted in a "state of emergency." 

"It is very typical of Putin's regime to use a new word to hide reality. What is happening today in the Kursk and Belgorod regions is clearly a war. But Putin knows that society cannot accept war. So he chooses other means to show that there is a problem without saying there is a war.

The political scientist added: "If you look at who has been appointed to lead the operation against the Ukrainian offensive, it is not the military, but people close to Putin, either from his bodyguards or from the FSB (editor's note: Russia's Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, is Russia's main intelligence and internal security service). Refusing to name the war as such forces him to resort to this kind of approach, which requires quite close cooperation. But we know that the various institutions involved are quite divided. Right now it's a mess there. The way Putin is trying to counter the offensive is quite irrational and not very effective."

(SR and Manon Pierre for Tagtik/Source: La Dépêche/Picture: by Kremlin.ru via Wikicommons under license Creative commons CC-BY-4.0)