Putin shifts nations’ neutral notions
Longstanding relations undone over a week, says a former US ambassador
WASHINGTON – In a matter of days, Russian President Vladimir Putin changed a lot of people’s minds – against himself and Russia.
Germany is shattering decades of pacifism. Sweden and Switzerland are abandoning their notions of neutrality and acting in concert to punish Putin for his invasion of Ukraine.
The result is an aggressive Western European unity not seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 – plus Cold Warstyle threats of violence, including nuclear threats from an increasingly cornered Putin.
Though the Russian president may have hoped to divide Western allies over a response to his unprovoked war, the stunning invasion instead triggered an international sea change that forced European countries to reckon with the most serious security challenge to the continent since World War II, said Liana Fix, a German historian and political scientist who is a resident at the German Marshall Fund.
While Putin has sought to reshape European security – including his demands to roll back NATO’S eastward expansion and removal of U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe – the invasion of Ukraine brought the threat to the EU’S doorstep.
“For the first time, the European Union saw a real threat perception and a threat in Europe that has left the EU to fight for itself with unprecedented measures,” Fix said. “The Ukraine war is perceived as a threat to European security because Moscow’s demands extend beyond Ukraine’s borders.”
While U.S. and EU officials applaud what they called unprecedented European unity in the face of Russian aggression, a more muscular and unified Europe also brings risks of expanded violence – including nuclear threats from Putin as he is increasingly cut off from the global economy.
‘Turning point’ for Europe
Ukraine itself is contributing to the shake-up of European arrangements.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Monday he has formally applied for Ukraine’s immediate membership in the European Union. Once a member of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s turn to the West in recent years is at the heart of Putin’s decision to invade the neighboring country.
Germany, which has been loath to use the military in light of its role in triggering World War II, cast aside its postcold War pacifism and embraced profound foreign and security shifts.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz committed Germany to the NATO goal of spending 2% of the GDP on defense, which previous governments were reluctant to do, and announced his government would set up a special 100 billion euro fund to upgrade the German military.
In a special session of the Bundestag, Scholz called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “a turning point in the history of our continent” as he announced his nation’s reputation-defying decision to send anti-tank weapons and surfaceto-air missiles to Ukraine to help it fend off the Russians.
“In the last week, we have seen five decades of German-russian relations come undone,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine during the Clinton administration. “I think the Kremlin was probably totally shocked by that.”
The policy U-turn came after Germany imposed its own economic sanctions on Russia and agreed to send weapons to Ukraine – a move Scholz initially resisted, citing Berlin’s post-world War II policy of restricting arms exports to conflict zones.
Berlin also killed a controversial $11 billion pipeline deal with Moscow that would have made it easier for natural gas to flow from Russia to Europe.
Neutral countries take a stand
Switzerland and Sweden, which stayed neutral during World War II, are imposing sanctions designed to “isolate Russia,” Swedish EU Minister Hans Dahlgren told Swedish radio.
Switzerland, home of famously secret bank accounts, is moving to freeze Russian accounts in its country. That one will hurt: Many Russian elites are believed to have secret Swiss bank accounts.
Swiss President Ignazio Cassis said his country is not giving up its neutrality – his country is willing to host peace talks between Russia and Ukraine – but he added: “That does not prevent us from calling a spade a spade.”
Being neutral doesn’t mean a country can’t take sides in a violent dispute, analysts said.
Martina Fuchs, a Swiss business journalist based in London, said Switzerland sees itself as “a credible and neutral mediator in the area of peace building,” and it is important it takes a stand on Russia’s aggression.
“Neutrality would indeed have been violated if Switzerland hadn’t taken any action,” she said.
Sweden is sending anti-tank missiles to Ukraine to help it fend off Russian invaders, an extraordinary move by a country that has historically gone to great lengths to avoid military conflict. Stockholm, too, joined several other countries – including neutral Austria –
in announcing plans to close its airspace to Russian aircraft in response to the invasion.
Russia isolated
All sorts of governing bodies are moving against Putin’s government, seeking to isolate it economically.
On Monday, FIFA – which runs world soccer – imposed an indefinite ban on Russia’s national team, removing it from games needed to qualify for the 2022 World Cup. Other nations like Poland and Sweden had said they would not play the Russians.
Russia hosted the last World Cup tournament in 2018.
The European Space Agency announced Monday that the launch of a joint Euro-russian mission to Mars, scheduled for later this year, is now “very unlikely.”
David vs. Goliath moment
Putin’s brazen invasion challenged the foundational principle of international order, which prohibits the use of force to acquire territory, said Bruce Jones, director of the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution.
“The rule that matters is the provision in the U.N. Charter against the acquisition of territory by force,” he said. “What we are watching is a huge rally of support to the defense of that core, cardinal provision.”
But last month’s invasion is hardly the first time Putin has challenged postcold War cooperation between Russia and Western allies. In 2008, Moscow invaded Georgia, and in 2014, it annexed Crimea from Ukraine, backing separatists on the eastern flank that roiled the country in a still-simmering conflict.
Pifer points out Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili sent troops into South Ossetia, which gave the Russians pretext to invade, while Crimea was largely a bloodless occupation.
“What you’re seeing now in this massive attack on Ukraine is just seen as orders of magnitude different from what Russians have done before,” he said. “And because Europe sees there’s no plausible justification for this, that has set off alarm bells.”
Unexpected international outcry also put more pressure on governments to respond, Fix said. She pointed to the decision to expel Russia from the SWIFT international payment system, which connects banks worldwide, after reluctance by some countries, including Germany, to do so.
Though the U.S. and Western allies have imposed more severe sanctions that have sent Russia’s economy into a free fall, removing Moscow’s access to SWIFT became a “symbolic issue” for demonstrators calling on governments to take a harsher stance against Putin, she said.
“The public pressure was really remarkable and I think that sort of added to some of these government policy changes we’re seeing,” she said. “I think what makes this war move the public feeling so much is it’s such a David against Goliath moment.”
Thousands of people protested across Europe while rallies took place in countries as far as Japan, Australia and the U.S. over the weekend to demonstrate against Russian aggression.
“There’s a sense of a belated awakening to the reality that Putin poses a dramatic security threat within Europe,” Jones said.
Peter Beyer, a member of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and a lawmaker in the Bundestag said Germany’s new defense policy marked “a historical turning point in German foreign and security politics.
“Unfortunately, it needed a war in the middle of Europe to make the government understand that we cannot hide behind our history forever and that it is not moral to leave close allies and likeminded states that are massively threatened by war alone,” he said.
NATO Secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg told CNN that Russia’s aggression is creating a “new normal” for the U.S. and Europe.
“U.S., but also European allies are now stepping up with more troops, more ships, more planes, and why we also have to realize that we are now faced with a new normal for our security,” he said. “There will be some longterm consequences. And this is just the beginning of the adaptation that we need to do as a response to a much more aggressive Russia.”
The invasion has brought into sharp focus that “hard security matters,”said Jörn Fleck, deputy director with the European Center at the Atlantic Council.
“This has to translate into a more coherent strategy for Europe, integrated into the transatlantic partnership and with NATO, but also a more strategic role for Europe as a geopolitical actor,” he said. “Europe now has a fundamentally adversarial relationship with Russia and that’s likely to remain for a generation.”
Part of that recognition, experts say, is geopolitical tensions with China, which could see Russia’s invasion as an opportunity to tighten its grip on the South China Sea, including the democratic island of Taiwan.
“China and Russia are both pushing in their own way to displace or weaken the West,” Jones said. “Neither are within the established security order, both are uncomfortable with the U.S. alliance structure and both are prepared to challenge hard over the nature of the order – this is the new reality for a considerable period of time.”
That could mean more collaboration between European and Asian partners. Part of the international response to Ukraine entailed a ban on the export of certain technologies and computer chips – a move that was embraced not only by Europe by also Japan, Taiwan and Singapore. “There’s going to have to be an important degree of collaboration across the two oceans going forward,” he added.
“The public pressure was really remarkable and I think that sort of added to some of these government policy changes we’re seeing.”
Liana Fix
German historian and political scientist who is a resident at the German Marshall Fund
Nuclear threat
Putin has not reacted well to Europe’s unexpectedly resounding condemnation and harsh sanctions.
In announcing he was putting Russia’s nuclear forces on higher alert status, Putin attacked European countries and the NATO alliance response.
“Western countries aren’t only taking unfriendly actions against our country in the economic sphere, but top officials from leading NATO members made aggressive statements regarding our country,” Putin said.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the most aggressive national military action since World War II – the cataclysm that gives rise to the international economic and military organizations that are also under pressure.
After the carnage that wrecked the European continent from St. Petersburg to Berlin to London, the United States and Europe spent decades building security and economic structures designed largely to thwart the rise of the Soviet Union, then Russia. After the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed between 1989 and 1991, the Americans and Europeans spent decades accommodating those structures to a new and supposedly democratic Russia. Now that architecture has collapsed in less than a week, thanks to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
But Putin’s threat of nuclear war may just be more of the Russian leader’s bluster, Pifer said, noting that the U.S. and NATO have repeatedly drawn a red line on sending troops into Ukraine to fight Russia.
“This kind of a threat may be a sign that he’s getting a little bit rattled that the Russian military campaign hasn’t resolved things yet,” Pifer said. “It was based on a huge miscalculation about the kind of resistance that they would face.”