Column on the fourth anniversary of the start of the war in Ukraine:
Long way to peace
Four years ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. The war started much earlier, but its causes are kept secret in the West. Instead of discussions, there are sanctions. Where do we stand? What’s next?
Four years ago, the war in Ukraine escalated. It was not a “turn of the times”. There are no turning points in history. Tolstoy already wrote in “War and Peace” that all errors of historiography begin with erroneous periodizations. The story cannot be divided into arbitrary sections. Rather, it is a river, a whirlpool of events that have worked on each other in an often mysterious way.
Seizure of power and outbreak of war
The term “turn of the times” is propaganda. He wants to suggest that something unprecedented had happened at that time, that a fundamental new chapter had been opened and that, logically, any look at previous events would be superfluous. Whoever says “turn of the time” sets an inescapable starting point, one hour zero. He pretends that the event, the alleged turning point, has no history.
The word “turn of the times” is associated with the claim that Russia’s attack took place out of the blue, without any cause outside the brain of the Russian president. Thus, Putin can still be labeled as an evil aggressor who attacks a peaceful country for no reason, for no reason. A discussion about whether this is really true is strangled with the word “turn of the times”.
There are very good reasons to doubt this interpretation. In October 2022, in a Weltwoche interview, the then president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Peter Maurer, whose people were present on the battlefields of Ukraine from the beginning, declared that the war had begun much earlier, already in 2014, after a violent seizure of power by an anti-Russian government in Kiev.
This coup, in turn, half popular uprising, half remote-controlled US intervention, was the result of previous entanglements and interference. Always was Ukraine, an extremely young state, the apple of contention of the empires, torn between East and West. The West was always anti-Russian. In the east, in the Donbass, in Crimea it was the other way around. The internal division was revealed in each election.
When the Western clique, guided by strategists from the White House, breaking the promise to hold new elections – which had also been agreed with Russia – went to power, so to speak, indiscriminately, there were movements of secession in the east. There was resistance in the Donbass. It intensified after the imposition of discriminatory language laws. Crimea also distanced itself from Kiev.
Crimea: Annexation? Secession?
Whether the accession of the old Black Sea peninsula of Crimea to Russia was a secession or an annexation is an interesting question. Probably both are true. The fleet base, which is strategically important for Russia, certainly did not have to be forced to join the Russian Federation. There was a referendum, albeit controversial. But today the Crimea seems to feel at home in Russia.
Kiev reacted violently to the depositions. A war by the government against its own population broke out in the Donbass. From 2014 to 2022, according to UN estimates, there were 14,000 deaths, mainly members of the Russian-speaking minority, including the victims of a massacre by ultra-nationalist Ukrainian activists in Odessa. Moscow intervened, achieved rapid military successes and forced the Ukrainian rulers to the negotiating table.
Participants describe the conferences as a kind of high-performance diplomacy with up to 19-hour sessions between Germany’s Chancellor Merkel and Russian President Putin. Merkel later said that the Minsk treaties only wanted to gain time for the reconstruction of the Ukrainian army. Was that really so? In any case, there was no peace, the civil war in the east flared up again.
The role of the Americans
The discord between the two ex-Soviet republics of Russia and Ukraine was superimposed and exacerbated from the beginning by geopolitics. Based on the theories of a British imperialism theorist and the writings of the exiled Polish US security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the US pushed forward the expansion of its NATO by the former member states of the Warsaw Pact.
The aim of these strategies was to separate Ukraine from Russia, to press the former empire of the Tsars to the Central Asian oligarchies and to China. Conversely, the Americans would secure supremacy on the Eurasian continental plate and thus a kind of world hegemony. It was hoped and believed that Russia was too weak to counter these aspirations.
It was a high-risk adventure, a ride on the razor blade. Already in the 1990s, well-known US diplomats had warned against NATO expansion. It will radicalize Russia, conjure up the danger of war. Didn’t the United States promise the Russians at the time of the fight-free withdrawal of the Soviet troops not to extend their military zone of influence not a millimeter to the east?
Of course, it is true that Poland, Hungary, the Baltic States, Romania, former vassal states under the harsh snare of Moscow, longed for American NATO protection. Who would have wanted to make them wrong with this? However, it was a serious mistake of the victors of the Cold War to simply whip through the security of the Eastern Europeans while bristling, and even humiliating Russia.
Moscow should have been included, yes it should have. The clever Henry Kissinger was right when he suggested early on a Ukraine, which was neutral as a bridge between Russia and the West. In the eyes of the Nobel Prize winner, a federalist state structure would also have been necessary in order to maintain the precarious cohesion of the parts of the country. It didn’t come to that.
Instead, the Americans carried out their NATO-East expansion. The angry Russians were put off, the bases were not directed against them, but against Iran. Would the Americans have accepted such appeasements if Russian nuclear weapons had been stationed in Mexico or Venezuela?
The milk became really sour from 2006. At that time, the NATO summit in Riga formulated for the first time the possibility of Ukraine and Georgia joining. The result was Putin’s famous incendiary speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. The Americans, led by President George W. Bush, remained unimpressed. At the NATO summit in Bucharest 2008, the accession goal was to be officially anchored. Merkel and Sarkozy put it in the footnotes. After all.
Of course, all this does not result in the right to a military intervention by Russia in Ukraine. But one can already wonder why the Americans attracted the Russian bear so penetratingly, all warnings and offers to the wind. Did they have a war? Did they want to provoke a war? NATO policy in any case is one, perhaps the main cause of war, in Ukraine.
Putin: Diplomacy to the end
The Russian president can be credited with wanting to prevent the worst to the end. He sent diplomatic notes, met with US President Biden in Geneva, but his demands bounced. All negotiations to stop the civil war, as well as the de facto progressing NATO integration of Ukraine, failed. Finally, Putin decided to invade his troops in 2022.
The Russians have a point when they say that this war was imposed on them from the outside. The NATO policy of the Americans in Ukraine was negligent. However, it was also irresponsible that the Ukrainian presidents, most of them severely corrupt, committed themselves to letting their country be abused as an instrument of foreign power policy against Russia. Selenskyj belongs in this series.
Our media write that the Ukraine attack was an “unprovoked war of aggression”. That could be argued. No great power can tolere it when another great power is about to expand its military infrastructure to the security-sensitive territory of the others. When the Soviets wanted to station nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962, President Kennedy threatened the Russians with nuclear war.
The then USSR Secretary General Khrushchev had his missile transporters turned off. A direct conflict was avoided. However, the Americans showed Putin the cold shoulder and sent military advisers to Kiev to support the rearmament of the Ukrainian army. With this they crossed the “reddest of all red lines”. Their diplomats had warned them. They did it anyway.
No wonder, people in the West today prefer to talk about a “turn of the times”, because it is unpleasant to talk about the time before the alleged turn. But the truth is also that Putin seriously misjudged himself. He believed that Ukraine would collapse. The advance to Kiev became a disaster and a PR debacle. The proof seemed to be that Russia wants to incorporate the whole of Ukraine.
Swallow a porcupine?
However, this is unlikely. Putin’s attack was not a full-scale invasion, as the British write. He allowed only 190,000 soldiers to invade. When the Wehrmacht invaded Poland in 1939, the troop strength was 1.5 million. It is also doubtful whether Putin really wanted to conquer western Ukraine. These areas are traditionally extremely anti-Russian. It would be like swallowing a porcupine.
Circles close to the Kremlin in Moscow claim that Putin wanted to bomb the regime in Kiev to the negotiating table with his invasion. With success, because already in March 2022 they sat together in Istanbul. An agreement seemed within reach. Zelensky tweeted that he agreed with a neutral Ukraine. But Washington intervened because they hoped to be able to strategically weaken Russia with the lever Ukraine.
So it is not wrong when the American author Benjamin Abelow writes that the West has carried the war to Ukraine. Without NATO interference, without the penetration of the Western military alliance on Ukrainian soil, the Ukraine war would not exist. This elementary fact is kept secret from Western states because they are not willing to admit their responsibility for this debacle.
Meanwhile, most European governments, including Switzerland, are warring parties against Russia. They deliver weapons or participate in economic war. That is why they all have an interest in presenting Russia as a deterrent enemy image. Demonization serves to justify one’s own policy. The rhetoric is shrill. On the one hand, it should emotionally whip people up for the war, on the other hand, distract them from their own mistakes and entanglements.
Question of war crimes
This chapter also includes the accusation of serious war crimes by the Russians. We are talking about an actual war of extermination against the Ukrainian population. Our media and politicians rely exclusively on Ukrainian sources in these assessments, who of course have an interest in putting things in a terrible and advantageous light for them. That’s understandable.
Questionable, however, is the uncritical adoption of such narratives by our journalists. They present the party representations as indisputable truths. They are not. In the aforementioned Weltwoche interview, which took place after the Butscha massacre, ICRC President Maurer contradicted the thesis of a war of extermination, which was already widespread at the time: Russians and Ukrainians had the greatest regard for civilians.
On the question of war crimes, Maurer expressed himself in a differentiated way. There are, but on both sides. It can be said about Butscha that there have been no truly independent investigations to date. Also, in its arrest warrant against Russian President Putin, the International Criminal Court in The Hague does not target Butscha, but on the alleged kidnapping of children.
The Russians are also defending themselves against this accusation, although they, like the USA and Israel, do not recognize the Hague Court. Whatever the horrors are, even in war, the presumption of innocence should apply, even for Russia, until the undoubted proof of the opposite. It is disturbing that such self-evidentities of the rule of law are perceived as offensive in Europe.
Phantasmagories of Power
The war is entering its fifth year. Everyone involved is paying a high price. Russia is also in trouble. But joy about it is short-sighted. The West, the Europeans have no interest in a destabilized Russia, in an implosion of the center of power with unforeseeable consequences. The Americans have noticed this in the meantime and radically redirected. The Europeans are defiant against it.
In Brussels, people give themselves to the hope that Russia is massively weakened, that a military victory for Ukraine is still possible. In the summer of 1942, the Wehrmacht was also still convinced that they had actually defeated the giant Russia. One wonders if the followers and publishers of such judgments slept in history class. Russia is always underestimated.
Von der Leyen, Merz, Macron and Starmer pile up huge mountains of debt before the horrified eyes of their citizens. Politicians who do not manage to ensure that trains run on time in their own country revel in geopolitical phantasmagoria of power. Already respected German media are calling for nuclear weapons for the German Federal Republic. They are like co-alcoholists in this political frenzy of size that you don’t have at all.
Germany in the Hitler trap
How to proceed? One can only hope that Washington and Moscow agree. The Eurocrats laugh at Trump and keep a critical distance. They would have to thank the US president from the bottom of their hearts, because his peace policy is primarily in the interest of Europe. Russia appears very confident, indicating that its troops have the upper water. Nevertheless, a peace of negotiation would be better.
Wars are always a battleground of misunderstandings. Every country tends to put its own historical experiences into a conflict. Germany in particular is in a delicate, exposed position. After the disaster of the 20th. At the beginning of the 19th century, German politicians are particularly trying not to make a mistake, this time to be on the right side of history.
Seductively, there is the possibility of not succumbing to “evil”, but of resisting. The temptation is great to recognize in an autocrat like Putin a repeater of the dictator from his own poison cabinet. Germany in the Hitler trap: As understandable as this urge is, because it relieves the conscience, it is deceptive and dangerous because it can lead to false historical analogies.
Army of unexploded ordnance and world threat
From this point of view, concessions to Putin are “appeasement”, food for the monster, which one is eaten by in the end. Germany’s foreign policy obeys the Hitler scheme in its assessments. First Putin will bring Ukraine “home to the Reich”, then he will attack other countries, conquer “living space”, exactly according to the script of the National Socialists. Therefore, there should be no compromise.
The fact that Putin has been denying such scenarios for years is irrelevant to the advocates of this thesis. After all, Hitler also lied to all the other states. They also do not accept the argument that the Kremlin ruler had given himself a lot of time to start his world war of constor – at the age of almost seventy years. Anyone who disagrees will be dumped as „Putin sympathizer“.
German experts and government politicians are prepared for a Russian attack. Even Swiss newspapers such as an NZZ (Neue Zurcher Zeitung) or the German FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) believe almost to the hour that they know when the Russians will start their offensive. The question of what interest the Kremlin might have at all in packing the economically weakened, awake and affected by migration problems EU states remains unanswered.
The writer George Orwell coined the term “doublethink”, “double thinking”. This means the ability to simultaneously hold two thoughts that exclude each other out. Germany’s Russia strategy follows this pattern. On the one hand, one deligs in Putin’s alleged unexplodance army. On the other hand, she is trusted with the conquest of Europe.
For the EU, Russia is at the same time weak and overpowering, incompetent, but at the same time the greatest danger to the free world, a free world that punishes dissidents with sanctions. Criticism of the official narratives is considered “Kremlin propaganda”, as “disinformation”. Only one opinion is allowed – as it once did with Corona. In the fight against the autocracies in the East, the EU democracies are becoming more and more authoritarian.
Bright spot Trump
The Americans see it quite differently. For the new US government, Putin is not a threat, but a partner for the West. President Trump’s special representative Steve Witkoff says this explicitly. Between Brussels and Washington, unreconcilable, diametrically opposed positions collide. One tends to take the American view for the more realistic.
US President Trump is right: peace with Russia is better than war. Also his vice J. D. Vance is right when he laments the decay of democratic pillars in Europe, the limited freedom of speech, the legal persecution of opposition to the repetition of elections with unwanted results. The Ukraine war is destroying Ukraine, damaging Russia, but it is also poisoning Europe. You have to end it.
There are still obstacles. The Russians want the Donbass, the international recognition of Crimea, an end to sanctions and a neutral, NATO-free Ukraine. The Americans would agree, but President Zelensky does not want to give up the Donbass fortresses not yet occupied by Russia for security reasons. Whether he can maintain his resistance is questionable.
Russia is confident in the negotiations. Putin says he can also achieve his goals militarily. At the same time, he seems willing to stop the war, which is also stressful for his country, by means of negotiation. For the world, especially for Europe, it would be advantageous if the parties agreed. The EU should not oppose it, but support the Americans.
Russophobia and verbal power in Europe’s capitals are wrong. But it is true that the EU states are putting their armies, which have been neglected for decades, in order again. Paranoid armament orgies are not needed, not even absurd mountains of debt. The states have enough money. You just have to start setting the right priorities.
(R.K./TGP Weltwoche for
Liberland Press)
