We never thought we would ever experience this again: a classic war in Europe. That was the unanimous reaction of people around me to the news that Russia had launched its attack on neighboring Ukraine. Russia attacks Ukrainethat’s how I got it The New York Times on his site the unimaginable together in just three words. Three words that hit like a punch and make us spin on our legs.
Bret Stephens, a columnist for the American newspaper, had already said a few days earlier that we were in the Age of the Unthinkable life, the age of the unthinkable, the unbelievable. It started with the September 11 attacks, then Trump came, then a global pandemic broke out and now there is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We slowly roll from one calamity to another. No happy twenties.
We can’t say we weren’t warned in recent years. The withdrawal of Russia from all kinds of international treaties, the military actions in Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, the war of secession in eastern Ukraine, the propping up of Assad in Syria, the sending of Russian soldiers to Kazakhstan – all these were signs on the wall. .
ominous piece
Just last summer, Putin published a long article ‘On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians’. It was an ominous Mein Kampf-piece. It raised the question of whether Putin was not preparing the ground here for forcibly forging back together what he believes belong together: Russia and Ukraine. But the article didn’t get too much attention.
I am sure that at some point Western politicians and diplomats knew full well that they were dealing with a dangerous man. As a Europe correspondent, I noticed that the countries of the European Union invariably stood together when it came to subversive actions by the Russians on European soil, such as the poison gas attack on former Russian spy Skripal in Britain. For a moment, people were not divided as usual, dozens of Russian diplomats were expelled. But at the same time they were not prepared for a total confrontation.
There was always the idea that, in the context of hybrid warfare, Putin mainly handed out pinpricks, such as spreading disinformation, meddling in Western election campaigns, cyber attacks, hacks, shutting off gas taps. All sneaky, covert actions designed to destabilize the opposing side. He would not risk an overt, direct attack, was the estimate. This created the space for European diplomacy to follow an exchange-bath tactic in which sanctions and cooperation, confrontation and cooperation went together.
Diplomatic wishful thinking
Compartmentalization of relations with Putin, as a Dutch diplomat called it. Also, Russia would no longer pose the existential threat to Europe from the Cold War era. It spends a lot on defense but that $60 billion is a pittance compared to America’s 600 billion and also much less than the EU countries’ 200 billion combined, so the story went. They were all attempts to put the tension with Russia into perspective and to make it manageable, but this diplomatic wishful thinking has become the first victim of the invasion of Ukraine.
We must now conclude that those hybrid actions were the prelude to an old-fashioned war of conquest. For Ukraine, Russia is indeed an existential danger. And that 60 billion in Russian defense spending is indeed not that much, but that fact means nothing if Putin is willing to use those billions for an actual war and the West is not.
The attitude of the western countries is now receiving a lot of criticism. It is right on one point: Europe should never have become so dependent on Russian gas. Trump had warned German Chancellor Merkel about it, but she didn’t listen. On the other hand, the fear of alienating Putin completely from the West is understandable. After all, Russia is one of the two largest nuclear powers in the world.
Devil’s Game
Moreover, the zeitgeist is playing a devilish game with us. In Western societies he represents progressive changes and emancipation movements in the field of race and gender. We are not dealing with geopolitics here, we are discussing the abolition of the concept of woman and the concept of man. But beyond the West, the zeitgeist stands for autocrats who think in spheres of influence, territorial wars and repression. I would almost like to say: will the real zeitgeist please stand up?
After the annexation of Crimea, then US President Obama scornfully said Putin was a man of the 19th century. A man of the past; now there is the anxious question of whether he is not the man of the future. A dark future in which Western populations, in the midst of all the identitarian discussions, may be forced to make a mental turnaround and to better distinguish between main and side issues.
mythomaniac
What is certain is that the Putin problem will not just go away. He is a mythomaniac who has created his own reality in which he wants to restore the old empire on behalf of the Russian people and on that basis denies the Ukrainian ‘brother people’ its right to exist.
In this myth, Russia is the attacked, the aggrieved, the others are invariably the attackers. It is a hall of mirrors that the former KGB spy has built himself and in which it is not clear what is real and what is unreal. It’s meant to mislead the opposing side, but since Putin appears to have come to believe his myth, the question is whether, as historian Timothy Snyder writes in The Atlantiche himself can still find his way out of the hall of mirrors.
Arie Elshout is a journalist.