Year of war in Ukraine has left Europe forever changed
A year ago, the day Russia invaded Ukraine and set in motion a devastating European ground war, Finnish President Sauli Niinisto declared: “Now the masks are off. Only the cold face of war is visible.”
Niinisto, in office for more than a decade, had met with Russian President Vladimir Putin many times, in line with a Finnish policy of pragmatic outreach to Russia, a country with which it shares a nearly 835-mile border. Suddenly, however, that policy lay in tatters, and, along with it, Europe's illusions about business as usual with Putin.
Those illusions were deeprooted. 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 Putin's Russia had become aggressive, imperialist, revanchist and brutal — as well as impervious to European peace politics — was almost impossible to digest in Paris or Berlin, even after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. An increasingly militaristic Russia might swim, quack and look like a duck, but that did not mean it was one.
“Many of us had started to take peace for granted,” Niinisto said this month at the Munich Security Conference after leading Finland's abrupt push over the past year to join NATO, an idea 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 and strategic objectives. A continent on autopilot, lulled into amnesia, has been galvanized into an immense effort to save liberty in Ukraine, a freedom widely 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 EU has provided about $3.8 billion in military assistance to Ukraine.
Overall, European states, as part of the union or individually, have pledged more than $50 billion in various forms of aid to Kyiv, imposed 10 rounds of sanctions, absorbed more than 8 million Ukrainian refugees (nearly the population of Austria) 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 German Chancellor Olaf Scholz used almost a year ago in a speech announcing a $112 billion investment in the German armed forces. He meant it for Germany, a country traumatized by its Nazi past into visceral anti-war sentiment, but the word also applies to a continent where the possibility of nuclear war, however remote, no longer belongs in the realm of science fiction.
The post-Cold War era has given way to an uneasy interregnum in which great-power rivalry grows. “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia,” U.S. President Joe Biden said this past week in Warsaw, Poland. He spoke as China and Russia held talks on their “no limits” partnership and Putin suspended Russian participation in the last surviving arms control treaty between the two biggest nuclear-armed powers.
It is the Age of Reordering, and Europe has been obliged to adjust accordingly.
“The war has sent Europeans back to basics, to questions of war and peace and our values,” said Francois Delattre, French ambassador to Germany. “It asks of us: Who are we as Europeans?”
Without the United States, the heroic Ukraine of President
Volodymyr Zelenskyy 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.
So, as a long war looms along with a possibly protracted stalemate, the EU will grapple with how to reinforce its militaries; how to navigate tensions between front-line states intent on the complete defeat of Putin and others, including France and Germany, inclined toward compromise; and how to manage an American election next year that will feed anxieties over whether Washington will stay the course.
In short, the war has laid bare the path before Europe: how to transform itself from peace power to muscular geopolitical protagonist.
“Even if the war ends soon, there will be no going back,” said Sinikukka Saari, a Russia expert and research director at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. Not on Finland's decision to join NATO, and not to Europe's status quo ante.
“European politicians are not familiar with thinking about hard power as an instrument in foreign policy or geopolitical affairs. Well, they have had a crash course.”
— Rem Korteweg, Dutch defense expert