Tribune. The urgency of fleeing, with still small children, an old mother and a cat, from a place where life has become physically impossible, as under the carpet of Russian bombs and missiles in Mariupol, a martyred and resistant city, is a experience of extreme violence. When the alarm of the survival instinct takes hold in the guts and envelops the bodies of loved ones, you lose all inner peace: you have to leave! Now and running. This “leaving!” », unique salvation and also abomination, is, very exactly, a «desperate hope».
One of the classics of the “Putinian” game is to offer in words a “humanitarian corridor”, a promise which should produce frantic departures in immense and immediate relief. After their heartbreaking and desired departure, the besieged, believing themselves to be saved by the offer of lawful escape, pass, in barely a few hours on a mad road, from the status of citizens (with their housing and their rights, in particular to vote) to that of refugees who have lost everything. There, in such a corridor supposed to be safe, we learn that there are mines. Elsewhere, the line of life-saving buses is bombarded, when it’s not whole families on the side of the road… The aggressor decides the route. He will film the people en route for his amazing propaganda, where the facts will also be betrayed, reversed into their opposite.
What is the tactical meaning of these recurring betrayals? We had already noted, in Syria, a figure of this “Putinian” style in three phases. First a bombardment of civilians. Then, in the second phase, the wounded and rescuers arrive, in panic and with tears of blood, to a place of treatment. Then, in the third phase, a single Russian plane arrives on the horizon, calm, which is precisely targeting this place of care… It would be a question of destroying the morale of civilians by pushing them to absolute despair, with this third phase of pure cruelty . One thing is the violence of destruction of the forces of the aggressor, another thing is this way of producing, by the rhythm and the targets of the bombardments, chosen one would say for their vulnerability, an increased suffering of the civilians.
Aim for moral suffering
It seems that the wars of the Russian president have chosen the tactical use of “inflicting pain” on civilians, in addition to military actions where he always has the advantage of the balance of power. In the current war, the offer of humanitarian corridors – arousing this desperate hope of the most vulnerable fraction of the population and deliberately betraying its promise of “silence” of the bombs when boarding the bus – fits into this style. Putin’s aim of aiming, beyond the destruction, at an increase in the moral suffering of the victims.
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