There is a slight smell of ex-Yugoslavia in this Ukrainian war. Remember, that was barely thirty years ago. The Berlin Wall had come down two years earlier. Further south, Yugoslavia, born from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and culturally close to Russia, was cracking everywhere.
Thirty years later, blood is once again flowing over the debris of the communist world. Thirty years later, a young nation is once again defending its independence from the old empires. Yesterday Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Ukraine today. As Jean Quatremer writes in Release, this conflict is in a way a “frozen” conflict directly arising from the past. Everything happens as if, to protect himself from the advances of NATO, Putin was carrying out the wars that should have taken place at the time of the collapse of the Soviet bloc with a few decades of delay.
But there is a big difference between 1991 and 2022. The American giant having made its strategic shift towards the Pacific and China, it is now out of the question for NATO to intervene directly as Bill Clinton did in the former Yugoslavia. . One can even wonder if the American president has not rushed this intervention by publicly revealing that he would never risk the life of a single GI to save Kiev, let alone Kharkov, Mariupol or Odessa. In diplomacy, one escapes ambiguity only at one’s own expense.
Whatever one thinks of it, in this affair, Vladimir Poutine is neither the monster nor the madman whom one enjoys ridiculing in a certain press. He is a cold-blooded animal who has perfectly understood that between the explosion of gas prices, Chinese neutrality, European impotence and the catastrophic withdrawal of the Americans from Afghanistan, he had a space for intervention unique in consolidating its sphere of influence and restoring some of that grandeur that had characterized Russia since Peter the Great. Even if it means paying the price in terms of sanctions. According to the thesis of French defense specialist Pierre Servent, his primary objective would not be to conquer Kiev, but to recover after negotiations a buffer zone between Donbass and Crimea.
Perhaps the master of the Kremlin has already gone too far. But, how can we be surprised that it reacts to the enlargement pursued by NATO at a forced march since 1999? As recently as last June, the largest military exercise for 20 years was held in the Black Sea. Operation Sea Breeze mobilized 5,000 soldiers, 40 planes and 32 boats from Ukraine and around thirty Western countries. Close to Russian territorial waters.
Ukraine remains today more than ever an eminently strategic place. The one that Samuel Huntington designated as the point of balance between the West and the Orthodox world. The one whose control would prevent any Russian-European alliance, according to Jimmy Carter’s former adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. It is no coincidence that, after the invasion of Crimea in 2014, Henry Kissinger spoke of the “Finlandization” of Ukraine. A proposal still relevant.
Thirty years later, what has not changed one iota is Europe’s atavistic impotence. It has even increased with Germany’s voluntary dependence on Russian gas – which the new sanctions will soon partly replace with American gas. A dependence caused by the unilateral rejection of nuclear power, the only one able to ensure energy independence as it has ensured that of France for more than half a century. In this area too, morality does not make a policy.
This emasculated Europe remains strangely the only place in the world that still makes the economy the ultimate answer to political conflicts. The only one to still believe that economic prosperity leads irremediably to democracy, as has been practiced for thirty years. Brussels may well bend its chest and these sanctions may be inevitable, but they are above all a cruel admission of powerlessness.
This post-historical ideology made up of economism and pacifism makes countries unable to face the evolution of a world where empires and wars are back. This is also true of internal enemies. The same people who are disarmed before Putin today were disarmed yesterday and will be disarmed tomorrow before the rise of Islamism.
So far, the only winner in this war seems to be NATO. This organization born of the Cold War that Donald Trump thought of dismantling and that President Macron declared “brain dead” is regaining a virtue at little cost. The increase in military spending that Trump was asking for in vain, Putin will have obtained in a few days.
Let’s take note that on this continent of care bears which continues to delegate its defense to America, no one is ready to die for this soulless structure that we call Europe. It is no coincidence that only France has kept a defense worthy of the name. The country is also one of the few that is not afraid to affirm its attachment to the nation and its identity, for which it is constantly criticized across the Atlantic. However, it is not with democratic sermons that we will hold the wounded bear that is Vladimir Putin’s Russia in awe. A bear to which it will be necessary to speak again one day. For that, we need nations that know how to defend their interests.
Isn’t this the admirable lesson that the Ukrainian people are teaching us?