Six months after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there is no prospect of an end to the war. The fronts in the east and south are still moving daily. The difference the Western weapons make to Ukraine is closely monitored. Russia, too, continues to show its will to sacrifice soldiers’ lives for territorial expansion. This conflict is far from settled.
New are the Ukrainian drone attacks in Crimea, far behind the lines. On August 10, a Russian airbase was hit. Also sounded explosions at the bridge between the peninsula and the mainland. Kiev did not officially claim the attacks, but it did off the record. Although the Krimanexation was never recognized under international law, it was regarded as a military and political fait accompli outside Ukraine. Now Kiev radiates: the Donbas is not enough, we also want the Crimea back.
What is also new is that the violence extends to the Russian capital. The bomb attack on the nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin – which killed his daughter Darya – brings the war to Moscow. The Kremlin blames Ukraine, but according to the Russian opponent Ilya Ponomarjov, who fled to Kiev, Russian partisans are behind it. These domestic anti-war forces would have even more actions in store.
There is no longer any diplomatic consultation against this military tightening. The only recent bright spot was the grain agreement that should make exports from Ukrainian ports possible again. Mediators were the UN, with António Guterres in a visible role for the first time this war, and Turkey. Turkish President Erdogan, idiosyncratic neighbor to both, is the only G20 leader to have spoken physically with both Zelensky (in Lviv) and Putin (in Sochi) recently.
European leaders no longer venture diplomatic trips to Moscow. The beleaguered Ukrainians, but also the Poles, Balts, British and presumably Americans, would take it wrong. You can still call Putin. French President Macron had such a phone call last week, after which the Russian agreed to the inspection of the nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhya by the nuclear agency IAEA. Yet Anglophone media are invariably critical of such initiatives. Yale historian Timothy Snyder expressed the skepticism at a forum in Alpbach this week: “It’s fine for a small country like Austria to offer a table for peace talks, but not for France or Germany: they should help Ukraine end the war.” to win.”
This is still subtle compared to the suspicion in Polish government circles towards Germany. PiS leader Kaczynski recently spoke of nothing less than ‘a German-Russian plan to dominate Europe’. For the Poles, the Second World War, started in 1939 with a Hitler-Stalin pact to divide their country, is never far away. You can still argue that Putin wants to follow in the footsteps of Stalin, as a defender of the fatherland against “Nazis”. But Olaf Scholz in the footsteps of Hitler, that is not.
More striking, given his position, is that Prime Minister Morawiecki openly supports this line. He harshly accuses Germany and France of, among other things, Die Welt, Le Monde and NRC, to run the European Union as an ‘oligarchy’. He also sees imperialism ‘within the EU’. That some leaders in a club of 27 have more power than others is not a scoop. But to call a democratic federation where every member speaks at every level and even tiny Cyprus can paralyze things at times an imperial power is excessive.
Moreover, a major reason for going against Russia disappears from the picture: our democracy. The Ukrainians see this more clearly. They are escaping the clutches of their imperial masters in Moscow and longing for a peaceful existence as a sovereign state in a ‘post-imperial’ Europe. That’s what they fight for.
So the war continues, even for us here. Not expressed in soldier’s lives and car bombs, but in high energy prices, inflation, loss of purchasing power, gas shortages and the asylum tensions à la Ter Apel and Tubbergen – the repercussion of the reception of Ukrainians earlier this year.
The Dutch government must therefore place all this suffering and discomfort much more convincingly in the big story of the European Union Zeitenwende since February 24. As Macron did in a sombre speech last week, about everything that will come our way this fall: “We must pay the price for our freedom and values.”
Luke of Middelaar is a political philosopher and historian.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of August 24, 2022