“If Russia had won…”: the worst-case scenario we avoided, by Anne Applebaum

On February 24, 2023, it will be twelve months, fifty-two weeks and three hundred and sixty-five days that the Ukrainian army is fighting. In that time, the national soldiers and volunteers saved their capital, protected most of their territory and pushed the Russians out of the area they occupied during the first days of the conflict. During this period, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, became an international celebrity, the Ukrainian army was recognized as a major force, and the Ukrainian nation as a brave and resilient country.

After a year of the worst conflict in Europe since 1945, it is important to remember that none of this was inevitable. Zelensky’s survival was not inevitable, kyiv’s survival was not inevitable, nor was Ukraine’s continued existence as a sovereign country. In fact, in February 2022, many considered these facts to be unlikely.

On the eve of the invasion, some American experts advised against bringing military aid to Ukraine, arguing that the war would end prematurely. Russia would prevail so quickly, they claimed, that the Ukrainians would not even have time to use arms. Others, in Europe and the United States, repeated the Russian propaganda, wondering if Ukraine deserved to exist or to be defended. Some Western politicians have taken up these ideas, and continue to do so. What would have happened if their positions had prevailed? If another president, who did not care about European security, had been in place in the White House? If another president, who did not plead his country’s cause so convincingly, or who did not want to fight at all, had been elected in Ukraine? Just imagine for a moment a world without Ukrainian courage, or American and European weapons, or the unity and support of democracies around the world.

Without resistance, Ukraine today would be dotted with concentration camps

If Russia had carried out its plan, kyiv would have been conquered in just a few days. Zelensky, his wife and children were allegedly murdered by one of the killer commandos that roamed the capital. The collaborators, who had already chosen their apartments in kyiv, would have seized the Ukrainian state. Then, town by town, region by region, the Russian army would have fought what remained of the Ukrainian army until it conquered the entire country, to the point of reaching the Polish border. Initially, the Russian General Staff imagined that victory would take six weeks.

If all this had gone as planned, Ukraine today would be dotted with concentration camps, torture chambers and makeshift prisons, such as have been discovered in Boutcha, Izium, Kherson and all other territories. temporarily occupied by Russia and since liberated by the Ukrainian army. A generation of Ukrainian writers, artists, politicians, journalists and civic leaders – the Russians had prepared lists with their names – would already be buried in mass graves. Ukrainian books were reportedly removed from all schools and libraries. The Ukrainian language was reportedly removed from all public spaces. Hundreds of thousands of other Ukrainian children have reportedly been abducted and transported to Russia or trafficked around the world.

The Russian soldiers, strong in their brilliant victory, would already be on the borders of Poland, setting up new command posts, digging new trenches. NATO would be plunged into chaos; the entire alliance would be forced to spend billions to prepare for the inevitable invasion of Warsaw, Vilnius or Berlin. Inside occupied Ukraine, young men would be forced to enlist in the Russian army to carry out these conquests. Millions of Ukrainian refugees are said to be living in camps across Europe, with no prospect of returning home; the wave of sympathy which originally greeted them would have long since subsided; the money would run out, the backlash in progress. The Moldovan economy would have completely collapsed; a pro-Russian government in Moldova may already be planning for that country’s incorporation into a new Russian-Belarusian-Ukrainian federation, which a Russian propagandist hailed, all too soon, on February 26, 2022.

This disaster would not have been limited to Europe. On the other side of the world, Chinese plans to invade Taiwan are said to be on track, as Beijing assumes that an America unwilling to defend a European ally, and now totally mired in a long-term battle against an emboldened Russia , would never make an effort to rescue an island in the Pacific. The Iranian mullahs, equally elated by Russia’s success and Ukraine’s defeat, reportedly boldly announced that they had finally acquired nuclear weapons. From Venezuela to Zimbabwe to Myanmar, dictatorships around the world are said to have hardened their regimes and intensified the persecution of their opponents, now certain of the lapse of old rules – conventions on human rights and genocide, the right to war, prohibition, taboo, changing borders by force. From Washington to London, from Tokyo to Canberra, the democratic world would have faced its obsolescence.

kyiv is still standing

But none of that happened. Because Zelensky stayed in Kyiv, saying he needed “ammunition, not a taxi”; because Ukrainian soldiers repelled the first Russian attack on their capital; because Ukrainian society has united in support of its army; because Ukrainians at all levels have been creative in the use of limited resources; because Ukrainian civilians were, and are, ready to endure terrible hardship; thanks to all of this, we don’t live in this horrible alternate reality.

Inspired by those early weeks when Ukraine showed its courage, President Joe Biden and the United States Congress resisted the temptation of isolationism – “America First” – and rejected the cult of autocracy that bewitches part of the American right. European leaders – with the exception of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, one of the same cult’s chief ideologues – have also stood up to disinformation and carefully directed Russian smear campaigns, and agreed to support Ukraine. military and humanitarian. People around the world have seen Ukrainians resist a brutal dictatorship, and have given them time and money to help them.

Thanks to what we have all done together, kyiv is still standing. The Ukrainians still control the majority of their territory. The massacres, executions, mass violence planned by the Russians did not take place in most of Ukraine. The legend of Russian military prowess has been shattered. China and Iran are in the throes of discontent and unrest. The democratic world has not collapsed but has on the contrary been strengthened. Visiting Washington in December, the Ukrainian president said that we had “succeeded in uniting the world community to protect freedom and international law”. Zelensky thanked the Americans and Europeans on behalf of the Ukrainians, as he has done many times. But in truth, it is we who should be thanking them.

*Journalist at The Atlantic and historian, Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize winner. A specialist in Central and Eastern Europe, she is notably the author of Red Famine: Stalin’s War in Ukraine, Gulag: a story et Declining democraciesall published in French by Grasset editions.