A thin-haired man in his seventies has this week plunged a European country into misfortune, brusquely robbing a continent of its illusions of security and damaging a system of international agreements on interstate relations. The consequences of Putin’s war on world relations are enormous.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte said it Friday morning after an EU summit: “It is not just an attack on Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, it is also an attack on everything we have built in Europe after WWII. The security and stability of all of Europe are at stake. It is also about the freedom of countries to make their own choices and shape their own future. Russia has violated that international order in an unprecedented way.”
Former Chancellor Angela Merkel called the attack “a serious cut-off point in European post-Cold War history”.
As the Russian army advanced towards Kiev, Europe began to realize that the attack is much more than an attack on one country’s sovereignty. It is also about the future of the entire region, about the complex relationship between the West and Putin’s Russia and about the world order that was built after WWII.
In addition to Ukraine and Russia, Belarus is also directly involved to begin with. Well before missiles hit Ukraine, Putin recruited Belarusian autocrat Alexandr Lukashenko as a brother-in-law. A Russian force was brought into the country on the pretext of an exercise and then took part in the offensive. If Lukashenko is not a perpetrator, he is at least an accomplice.
It is impossible to say how far Putin will go, but there is no indication that he has other countries in his sights. This does not alter the fact that the Baltic countries and Poland are seriously concerned, even though they enjoy the protection of NATO. The latter does not apply to small Moldova, southwest of Ukraine.
Scare
In the run-up to the war, NATO has quickly shifted additional men and equipment to the eastern flank to deter Putin and bring armed forces into higher readiness. To prevent accidents and unintended escalation, NATO military commanders are in contact with Russian commanders. But, warned a former NATO commander, the Briton Richard Shirreff, in the Financial Times: war has its own dynamics, it is good to be prepared for an attack on a NATO ally.
The EU expects a large number of refugees and in addition the EU has to brace for economic consequences, which could be worsened by the sanctions that the EU itself imposes. “We will all feel the consequences of the Russian aggression,” Rutte said, for example through a higher price for energy.
In any case, Putin this week robbed Europe of the illusion that wars in Europe are no longer possible. Until Thursday 24 February 2022, democratic Europe felt more or less safe, firmly entrenched in NATO and the security guarantee of the US superpower.
Europe saw the Russian threat, but did not do enough with it. Russia has been aggressive before: invading Georgia, annexing Crimea and meddling in the war in the Donbas, supporting the Assad regime in Syria. Hopes that Russia would become a friend of the West under Putin had been dashed in the previous decade. That had no major consequences.
“I am so mad at ourselves about our historic failure,” Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the previous German defense minister, tweeted this week. “After Georgia, Crimea and Donbas, we have done nothing to really deter Putin.”
We keep making the same mistake by underestimating the danger, European Studies professor Timothy Garton Ash wrote on Thursday. Just as Stalin’s aggression in Poland in 1945 was not seen as a harbinger of the Cold War, so now we have not wanted to see the consequences of the annexation of Crimea. “And so we stand here again, clothed in nothing but the shreds of our illusions.”
Threads
After Crimea, NATO became more active in Eastern Europe and Russia was punished with (mild) sanctions, but Russia remained tied to the West by countless threads. The relationship became more and more awkward as Putin became more anti-democratic, but it was mutually beneficial economically. All connections to Putin’s Russia must now be reconsidered. A number of former European politicians have quickly given up their positions at Russian companies.
The way the West is now responding to Putin’s war will also be closely monitored in Beijing. How much room is there in the current geopolitical balance of power for military operations? The response to Putin’s aggression “will have a huge impact on whether and when China will attempt to annex Taiwan,” warned British professor and former politician Rory Stewart. Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Friday urged Putin to negotiate.
After the Second World War, the US and Europe built a system of international standards and agreements that, among other things, protect the sovereignty of states. The superpowers Russia and the US have violated that principle a few times, but rarely as blatantly as now. In Putin’s war, a nuclear superpower waltzes over an independent state that did not provoke, let alone threaten. “The post-1945 norm of not taking your neighbors’ territory by force has been bent at times,” political scientist Joseph Nye said this week in a trade journal. Foreign Policy“But now that standard has been broken”.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad on 26 February 2022
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 26, 2022