In these leaden days, there are many places in Europe and the world where history is being written for decades to come. These are Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk. These are Moscow and Washington. And this is Munich, where the security conference ended on Sunday, February 20th. This largest Western forum of its kind is more relevant than ever since the end of the Cold War.
And not only because the Cold War has returned, and Western leaders will no longer be able to turn a blind eye to this. In eastern Ukraine these days, the war is getting hotter with the speed of new tweets. This is actually Russia’s war against Ukraine, which in the West has long been bashfully called either a “hybrid conflict” or “destabilization.”
The rhythm of war sounded at the conference from the first seconds. Every day before the opening, a video with disturbing music reminiscent of drum beats was shown in the main hall. All this was accompanied by sounds similar to the roar of either a siren or a dive bomber. The video series was completed by shots of the sea wave as a symbol of the crises that threaten to cover the world.
Only now NATO countries supply weapons to Ukraine
The organizers chose unlearning helplessness as the motto of the conference, which can roughly be translated as a call to “overcome helplessness”. This implies the weakness of the West in past years. The price for this weakness is being paid today primarily by Ukrainians. The West’s refusal to impose tough sanctions on Russia and supply weapons to Kiev after the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass in 2014 convinced Moscow that it could get away with a lot.
Roman Goncharenko
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky in Munich rightly reproached the West for failed attempts to appease the aggressor. Earlier, the same reproaches were voiced at the conference by his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko. He was listened to, but not always listened to.
Now the situation has changed radically. As Russian troops have been building up near Ukraine’s borders, many NATO countries have begun supplying weapons to Kiev at a record pace and threatening Moscow with new, maximally harsh sanctions in the event of a large-scale invasion of Ukraine. “We hope for diplomacy, hopes are fading, and if diplomacy loses, we are ready,” – this is the main result of Munich.
The West did not hear either Putin or Medvedev
The unity and determination of the West is to be welcomed, but it is eight years too late. There are many reasons for this, including good intentions. Munich 2022 is a stop along the way. The conference can already be called historic. On the discussion platforms, in the corridors and lobbies of the participants and observers, there was a feeling of a watershed, a turning point in the security system in Europe. The absence of an official Russian delegation, which did not come to Munich for the first time in decades, strengthened this impression.
Speeches by Western leaders fixed positions ahead of the possible start of what then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev called in Munich in 2016 as the risk of a “third world shake-up” amid worsening relations between the West and Russia. The West did not hear him, just as it did not hear in 2007 at the same conference of Russian President Vladimir Putin. His then Munich speech also went down in history, and this story is not over yet. Its finale will depend on how well the West has done the work on the mistakes.
Author: Roman Goncharenko, DW columnist
This comment expresses the personal opinion of the author. It may not coincide with the opinion of the Russian editors and Deutsche Welle in general.
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