War in Ukraine Has Changed Europe Forever

HELSINKI — A year ago, the day Russia invaded Ukraine and set in motion a devastating European war, President Sauli Niinisto of Finland declared: “Now the masks are off. Only the cold face of war is visible.”

The Finnish leader had met with President Vladimir V. Putin many times over the years, in line with a Finnish policy of pragmatic outreach to Russia, a country with which it shares a nearly 1,350-kilometer border. Suddenly, however, that policy lay in tatters, and, along with it, Europe’s illusions about business as usual with Mr. Putin.

The 27-nation European Union was built over decades with the core idea of extending peace across the continent. The notion that economic exchanges, trade and interdependence were the best guarantees against war lay deep in the postwar European psyche, even in dealings with an increasingly hostile Moscow.

That Mr. Putin’s Russia had become aggressive, imperialist, revanchist and brutal was almost impossible to digest in Paris or Berlin, even after the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

“Many of us had started to take peace for granted,” Mr. Niinisto said last month at the Munich Security Conference after leading Finland’s abrupt push in 2022 to join NATO, unthinkable even in 2021. “Many of us had let our guard down.”

The war in Ukraine has transformed Europe more profoundly than any event since the Cold War’s end in 1989. A peace mentality, most acute in Germany, has given way to a dawning awareness that military power is needed in the pursuit of security. A continent on autopilot has been galvanized into a huge effort to save liberty in Ukraine, a freedom seen as synonymous with its own.

“European politicians are not familiar with thinking about hard power as an instrument in foreign policy or geopolitical affairs,” said Rem Korteweg, a Dutch defense expert. “Well, they have had a crash course.”

Gone is discussion of the size of tomatoes or the shape of bananas acceptable in Europe; in its place, debate rages over what tanks and possibly F-16 fighter jets to give to Kyiv. The European Union has provided some $3.8 billion in military assistance to Ukraine.

Overall, European states have pledged more than $50 billion in various forms of aid to Kyiv, imposed 10 rounds of sanctions, absorbed more than eight million Ukrainian refugees, and largely weaned themselves off Russian oil and gas in a sweeping shift under acute inflationary pressure.

“Zeitenwende,” or epochal turning point, is the term Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany used almost a year ago in a speech announcing a $112 billion investment in the German armed forces. He meant it for Germany but the word also applies to a continent where the possibility of nuclear war no longer seems impossible.

François Delattre, the French ambassador to Germany, said: “The war has sent Europeans back to basics, to questions of war and peace and our values. It asks of us: Who are we as Europeans?”

In Mr. Putin’s telling, Europeans were part of a decadent West, stripped of any backbone. He was wrong, one of several mistakes that have undercut a Russian invasion that was supposed to end in days.

Still, if Europe has held the line, its acute dependence on the United States has been revealed once more. America has armed Ukraine with weapons and military equipment worth some $30 billion since the war began, dwarfing Europe’s contribution.

Without the United States, the heroic Ukraine of President Volodymyr Zelensky may not have had the military means to resist the Russian invasion. This is a sobering thought for Europeans, even if Europe’s response has exceeded many expectations. It is a measure of the work that still needs to be done if Europe is to become a credible military power.

As a long war looms, the European Union will grapple with how to reinforce its militaries; how to navigate tensions between frontline states intent on the complete defeat of Mr. Putin and others, like France and Germany, inclined toward compromise; and how to manage an American election next year that will feed anxieties over whether U.S. support will last.

In short, the war has laid bare the path before Europe: how to transform itself from peace power to muscular geopolitical protagonist.

Now, the line of fracture in Europe is not as hard as the Berlin Wall once was, and it is farther east, but it is there.

There is no mistaking it at Vaalimaa, the crossing on the Finnish-Russian border. Once notorious for its long lines, it is today a ghostly place. Its vast nearby shopping emporiums deserted. No longer a place of connection, it speaks of new European division.

Sinikukka Saari, a Russia expert in Finland, said, “Even if the war ends soon, there will be no going back.”

Lessons on hard power after taking peace for granted.