There are words that neither facts nor time contradict. On April 26, 2023, Robert Badinter, who died at the age of 95 on the night of Thursday February 8 to Friday February 9, gave his last radio and television interview. “I think that we French do not realize enough that there is a war in Europe. Today. Two and a quarter hours by plane from Paris. I have experienced war, I know what war is. It is there, it exists,” he declared clearly at the microphone of France Inter, referring to the war in Ukraine.
The former Minister of Justice, who abolished the death penalty in 1981, was then invited to speak about a work of which he was co-author; Vladimir Poutine. The accusation (Fayard). “Indisputably an indictment (…) What Putin would hear if he appeared before an international criminal justice system. But for that, he must leave power…”, he added in front of Léa Salamé. Robert Badinter then depicted a Russian president “carried away by hubris, by the impulse which leads a dictator towards what he believes is possible, and which then turns out not to be so”.
“When Putin launched his war of aggression against Ukraine, he invented a genocide of Russians in Donbass. This is just a pure lie. It is a pretext for a war of aggression which inevitably leads to war crimes, explained the former president of the Constitutional Council. This is the very type of totalitarian propaganda: you only need to look at the speeches of Goebbels or Hitler to see that there is a constant contempt for the truth and the interlocutor.”
And to cite “the multitude of crimes committed against civilians” in Ukraine. “The bombings of hospitals, schools, gang rapes… That’s the horror of war. The Ukrainians and the International Criminal Court are collecting the evidence. For what ? Because we realized, at the time of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, that afterwards it was very difficult to gather this evidence, and that it had to be done immediately, so that the accusation would be ready”,
With emphasis, the native of Paris pointed out the blindness of the younger generations to the situation in Ukraine for whom what is shown “on TV is a spectacle” and not “reality”.
He finally drew a parallel with the 1930s. “At the same time when we were increasing the working week to 40 hours, Hitler was increasing everything that concerned national defense to 60 hours in German factories… And everything concerned national defense. There was a kind of blindness, we didn’t see, or we didn’t draw conclusions from what was happening on the other side of the Rhine. And there, I see the parades, justified, about the question of pensions: but the first question is peace and war. Because it will not be an increase in the retirement age, it will be life and death. This is war; It’s life and death.”
