A peace deal will only come if Putin loses

The Victory Day celebrations in Moscow on May 9 felt like stale military folklore for years, with veterans, missiles and XXL uniform caps. The parade in Red Square was undoubtedly cement for national identity, but the rest of the world shrugged. The Chinese parades, with Xi Jinping standing in an open car, were now more exciting.

Red Square will be back in 2022. Speculation has been buzzing for days about what the Russian president will announce on Monday. Putin claims victory in the Donbas. Putin announces referendums in occupied territories. Putin moves to general mobilization. Putin, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace predicted, will declare war on global Nazism.

I study the madmen of history, the Hitlers and Himmlers, and yet I could not imagine this, in the Europe of 2022

But it’s Vladimir Putin. And so nothing is certain. The only thing that is certain is that on Monday there will be a leader in Red Square who has undergone a metamorphosis in two decades. From aspiring friend of the West, Putin turned into an unpredictable dictator who brought war back to Europe.

honey sweet words

The metamorphosis forces one to look back. Why didn’t the West see this coming? At the same time, it forces us to look ahead: how does the West deal with a superpower with which it is no longer possible to talk?

American professor Déborah Dwork, director of the Center for Genocide Studies in New York, gave the ‘Never Again Auschwitz’ lecture this week. In a interview with Fidelity she said: “After the invasion of Ukraine I thought to myself: I study the madmen of history, the Hitlers and the Himmlers and the Eichmanns. And yet I had no imagination that such a thing could happen again, in the Europe of 2022, where an elected leader would send his troops across the border of a sovereign country. It presented me with a big existential question: […] How did I not see it coming?”

Historians will likely need years to answer that question. Was it a lack of imagination? Laziness? Did the desire for a comfortable life with cheap Russian energy get in the way of difficult questions? Was it the fervent wish that after decades of the Cold War, a peaceful future with Russia was possible? Was Putin a creditable impostor?

Initially, Putin, who took office in 2000, nurtured the belief in successful cooperation between East and West. On September 25, 2001, he spoke as first Russian head of state in the German Bundestag. The hall was packed. To his right sat Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, his later bosom friend. Putin knew how to pack his audience. He quoted the thinkers Lessing and Humboldt, the humanism and the love of freedom of the city of Berlin. The honey dripped from the lectern. In fluent German, he showcased Russia as a “friendly, European country.” The main aim of Russian internal policy was “to guarantee democratic principles and freedom.”

The German politicians continued to applaud. Putin also noted that Russia would like to be treated as an equal partner, but the venom of that comment was submerged in the joy of the historic reconciliation.

Thunder Sermon in Munich

Six years later, Putin was back in Germany, hard-headed and determined to cause a riot. he was too guest at the Munich Security Conference. He took the podium and promptly announced that he would not abide by diplomatic courtesy. He intended to “say what I really think.” In Russian this time. He called the expansion of NATO to include countries in Eastern Europe a provocation. He lashed out at the omnipotence of the United States, which thought it was the only superpower and went beyond all borders. “The unipolar world is doomed to fail,” he said sternly.

Putin’s thunderous sermon in Munich has often been cited as a missed signal in recent weeks. A year later he invaded Georgia, seven years later he annexed Crimea. Yet four years after ‘Munich’, Russian gas first flowed through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Germany. The foundation for its controversial sister Nord Stream 2 was only laid in 2015, after the Crimea was taken. The West has missed more signals.

Every country deals with the geopolitical disappointment of the 21st century-so far differently. The United Kingdom is bold. Minister of Foreign Affairs Liz Truss sees the mistakes of the past as an incentive to take action now. Putin took the plunge, Truss argues, because there was no deterrent. We must now help Ukraine with everything we have in stock, including tanks and planes, she said during an interview. A peace deal will only come if Putin loses.

Germany, endowed with a great capacity for self-examination, turns itself inside out, wringing its hands. The star of 16-year-old former chancellor Angela Merkel drops because she was too soft for Putin. Her successor, Olaf Scholz, is still looking for decisiveness and Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier openly acknowledged the failure of his policy to sound Russia economically to the West. The Security Conference is under fire because it was where the Russian elite and German business could meet.

Also read: Liz Truss: ‘Putin is not doing this because he was provoked. That’s the basic point!’

New essential question for Europe

And the Netherlands? The Hague beat soul searching German style more or less left. Nevertheless, the Netherlands was one of the driving forces behind the gas transactions with Russia, certainly during Nord Stream 1. The Netherlands does trade: the promised weapon systems that are so good that Dutch military personnel do not want to lose them.

Action is necessary, so is looking back. It helps with the big questions of today. There is another ‘May 9’: Monday in the European Union is ‘Europe Day’, another worn out anniversary that will suddenly become important again in 2022. What does the war mean for the future of the European Union?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has ‘eclipsed’ the core of Europe’s peace project, reconciliation between Germany and France, think tank wrote Carnegie. The EU peace project must now find an answer to new aggression on the eastern border. That is the new essential question of the European project, which Putin also says on Monday.

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