Ukraine: Europe should not tolerate another war in its own home
Europe has not been able to prevent a terrible war from breaking out on its territory; despite the wealth, culture and technology, in the Old Continent we still have feet of clay when it comes to politics. We are an economic giant, but a political dwarf. Militarily we are powerful, but we are divided by states of which the United Kingdom and France are nuclear powers.
From a purely European perspective, a coexistence of the European Union with its neighbors to the east and south (with the United Kingdom is taken for granted, despite Brexit) is the most beneficial for everyone, from Morocco and Algeria to Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. But that European common house cherished in Gorbachev’s time has today become a chimera because the United States and Russia are using Ukraine as a hostage in their fight for geostrategic interests that affect the energy and arms markets. And because the European leaders have not wanted or have not been able to make peace and our legitimate economic interests prevail.
This story comes from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, in 1989. After the disappearance of the Warsaw Treaty that united Russia and its satellites against the US and its NATO allies, Europe ceased to be divided into capitalist democratic countries and communist authoritarian countries to be divided only into democratic and non-democratic countries, as they all embraced capitalism. NATO, far from dissolving as its adversary bloc had done, continued to add Eastern European countries to its ranks and Russia began to fear for its security.
The European ‘common house’ cherished in Gorbachev’s time today seems like a chimera
Ten years after the end of the Cold War, in 1999, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined NATO in the face of Russian protests; five years later, in 2004, seven more states joined (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia), and another five years later, in 2009, two new countries joined the Atlantic club, Croatia and Albania. In just one decade (1999–2009), NATO grew with 12 new member states from Eastern Europe.
In 1999 not only did the expansion of NATO begin, but it was also the moment when the Alliance intervened militarily in the Balkans, where Serbia refused to give autonomy to Kosovo, with whose rebels it was engaged in an ethnic war that caused thousands of assassinations and hundreds of thousands of refugees. In February 1999, the US, France, Great Britain, Russia and Germany called the parties in conflict to a conference in Rambouillet to achieve a limited autonomy agreement for Kosovo, but the negotiations failed due to the Serbian position.
On March 24, 1999, NATO (including Germany) began bombing military and strategic targets in Serbia and Kosovo to curb violence against Albanians without the backing of the UN Security Council. It was the first war in 50 years where NATO acted outside international legality, as Russia just did this February 24 in Ukraine.
In 79 days, more than 37,000 Alliance missions were carried out, and nearly 20,000 missiles and bombs fell on Serbian territory. After thousands of deaths and 860,000 refugees, on June 19, 1999, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic surrendered and Kosovo came under UN administration. Since then, many countries have recognized Kosovo as an independent state; but many others, including Spain, have not yet.
Russia subsequently adopted in Georgia and Ukraine the same rationale used by NATO to intervene militarily in Kosovo in 1999
The thing is that Russia took note and then applied the same argument that NATO used in the former Yugoslavia in 1999 to intervene in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2014 and this year in 2022: arming minorities like Kosovo from governments that they did not recognize their rights and mistreated their citizens. In Georgia they were South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and in Ukraine the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, under the pretext of which Putin separated the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.
Ukraine, supported by the US and the EU, was already at war with Russia since 2014 over the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, without respecting the Minsk Agreements of September 2015 by which Ukraine recognized a certain autonomy for these territories of the Donbass in exchange for peace. The attempts made by France and Germany in October 2016 and the December 2019 meeting between Putin and the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who promised in the elections to end the conflict with the pro-Russian separatists, also failed.
Freed from the war in Syria, from which it returned victorious, Russia began in January 2021 to prepare the military operation that was uncovered last Thursday, February 24, with the invasion of Ukraine. What was and is at stake in this conflict between NATO and Russia is the control of the mineral, gas and oil markets in Eastern Europe, as well as the defense material markets, which with this crisis receive a great impulse.
On the other hand, the big losers are Ukraine, which is being invaded militarily and from where in just five days nearly 500,000 refugees have already fled, and Germany, which depends on more than 50 percent of the Russian gas that arrives through the Ukrainian gas pipeline and that due to this war it has not been able to put into service another gas pipeline that will also bring Russian gas, but through the Baltic Sea (Nord Stream 2), which is strongly opposed by the US (with sanctions), Ukraine (with significant economic losses if Nord Stream 2 goes ahead, since it would partially replace the gas pipeline that crosses its territory), Europe and environmental NGOs.
We will also see what consequences this conflict has on the decarbonisation of the European economy, if it does not represent a big step backwards in environmental policies. But what is already irreparable is the damage done to the Ukrainian people by Russia; the loss, even more, of political and economic autonomy of the European Union with respect to the United States; the loss of confidence with the neighbors to the east, and the inflation in Europe caused by the rise in the prices of natural gas and oil.
Will we Europeans be intelligent and build peace with our neighbors instead of war, even though this is not in the plans of some allies, such as the US, who may see part of their business in Europe disputed by Russia or who do not want the EU economically dependent on Putin? Will we do what is necessary to be more sovereign in all fields? I doubt it very much, in view of the antecedents. Our leaders will be very stupid if they let the war take over part of the old Europe again. Citizens and voters should prevent it now. Not to the war!
Publicado inicialmente en anselmolucio.wordpress.com el 27 de febrero de 2022.
