They look like the masks with which the Greeks represented the theater. Vladimir Putin does not cry like the mask that represents tragedy, but his icy countenance seems closer to drama than comedy, represented by the mask that laughs and fits just Volodymyr Zelensky.
Before he became president of Ukraine, Zelensky was a comedian whose movies and TV shows drew laughs, while before he took over the Kremlin, Putin was a KGB agent to which two countries disappeared: the Soviet Union, the country for which he worked as a spy, and the Democratic Republic of Germany, the country where he worked as a KGB agent.
The immense emptiness that the State and the salary paid by that State disappeared, with the disappearance of the regime whose political police, the Stasi, was the intelligence apparatus with which he collaborated as a prominent Soviet agent in the city of Dresden, was the drama that led him down a path in which he faced other dramas: Caucasian separatism, ultra-Islamist terrorism occupying a school in Beslan, the taking of hostages in the Dubrovka theater, the sinking of the Kursk submarine in the Barents Sea and the bloody civil war in Syria, among others.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin could never have imagined that, on the stage of what could be the worst European tragedy since the Second World War, he would have as co-star of the drama a comic actor.
that young man no political experiencewho made his way to power with a television comedy in which he played a history professor who became president almost by accident, ended up co-starring in the electrifying chapter of European history that has the world in suspense.
Public Servant was the name of the program that made Ukrainians laugh out loud by caricaturing politicians and their manganets to enrich themselves with corruption. He gave the same name to the party he founded to confront the inept and corrupt ukrainian ruling classfrom the Europeanist path.
In this space that expresses suspicion and fear towards Moscow, in addition to the weariness with the Russian gravitation over Ukraine, the clashes between President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Timochenko, ruining the first pro-European government that had made possible the so-called Orange Revolution against pro-Russian governments, opened the way for novelty figures like Zelensky. And the face of her suitable for the funny faces and contagious smiles, she was confronted with the icy and emotionless face that the head of the Kremlin carries like an intimidating weapon.
With that Siberian wolf look, he made his way from St. Petersburg to the Kremlin. Leaving aside strong figures like Boris Nemtsov, Sergei Stepashin and Nicolai Aksenenko, Boris Yeltsin chose him as his successor when he left the presidency, because he saw in him the cunning and determination that was needed to help him leave the presidency without going to the bench. those accused of corruption cases.
While Yeltsin was starring in papers for getting drunk and marching from convalescence to convalescence due to his heart problems, his daughter Tatiana left her fingerprints on scandalous deals. That’s why she needed someone to watch her back so she could leave power.
Putin played that role to perfection and paid for his services by taking over the Kremlin.
Since he arrived at the main office of the palace located between the Moskva River, Red Square and Saint Basil’s Cathedral, the former KGB agent began to show cunning and coldness when making decisions.
The Russian army, which had known the defeat in afghanistan in the final stage of the Soviet era, he had just been defeated in Chechnya by the independence movement led by General Dudayev. But Putin sent him back to the small Caucasian republic, this time with orders to leave scorched earth. And that was what he did to prevail.
With the same coldness, the Russian president ordered an attack on the terrorists commanded by Movsar Barayev who had occupied the Dubrovka theater, in the heart of Moscow. It was October 2002 and almost a thousand people, including the public, dancers, choreographers and room staff, had been trapped at the mercy of insane jihadists ready to commit a hair-raising massacre. Then the president ordered the sending of Spetsnaz commandos, the special forces, to recover the room at any cost. And the cost included 130 dead hostages.
The other drama Putin tragically resolved It happened two years later, in North Ossetia, when around thirty Muslim terrorists occupied a school in the city of Beslan, taking teachers and children hostage. In the assault carried out by the security forces by order of the Russian president, the jihadists were annihilated, but at the price of more than three hundred deaths, of which almost two hundred were children.
The first of his cold decisions was not to “save” hostages, but to save a military secret: the structure of the nuclear submarine K-141 Kursk, which had sunk in the Barents Sea with 118 crew members.
British submarine rescue units that offered to rescue the Russian submariners needed, in order to act with a chance of success, a kind of X-ray of that formidable ship. But Putin preferred to save the military secret and the Kursk ended up being a steel sarcophagus with 118 corpses at the bottom of a frozen sea.
It also cost many lives, numbering in the tens of thousands, the intervention of the Russian military forces to save the bloodthirsty regime of Bashar al Assad in Syria.
This is how the man who wants to return to Russia the area of influence that he had controlled during the Soviet era and who does not hesitate to send tanks and troops to achieve it, went through dramatic scenarios. The former secret agent who amassed power like no predecessor since Stalin’s death. The leader who insists on giving Russia an international centrality that the economy of that country, by itself, cannot achieve. The cunning despot whose enemies die of poison, gunshots or freak accidents has stood center stage on the world stage, alongside an actor who comes from comedy but seems willing to take a price in blood and tears.
The two theater masks are at the point where the gazes of a world in suspense converge. The Greek muses Talia and Melpomene were opposed. The scenes follow each other dramatically, increasing the risk that lead to a tragedy.
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