The Russian president’s war is wreaking havoc on a country that sacrificed eight million people in World War II. With this campaign, the Soviet Union finally perishes.
In 1975 Leonid Brezhnev signed the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Putin is now walking this security architecture in the dirt with combat boots.
He cynically disregards the waiver of the use or threat of violence agreed in Helsinki and does not even rule out the use of nuclear weapons. Putin’s nuclear threat was directed against NATO – and against the Ukraine that relinquished the Soviet nuclear weapons stationed in 1994 in reliance on the guarantor powers Great Britain, the USA and Russia.
For Putin, even the first nuclear strike against a nuclear-weapon-free country is not taboo. Since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the threshold for a nuclear conflict has not been as low as it is today.
We now know that wanting to continue the policy of detente from the 1970s with Putin’s Russia was just as unwise as the strategy of the neoconservatives to work towards a return to the Cold War. The romanticism of detente and nostalgia for the Cold War, despite their contradictions, are based on the same fundamental error: Russia is like the Soviet Union.
But that is wrong. Unlike the Soviet Union, Putin’s Russia is not interested in maintaining the status quo.
Changing the status quo peacefully with a policy of “change through trade” led to the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1990. In the end, it was the economic soft power of democratic capitalism that mattered, not the number of tanks and warheads. Even then, the Soviet Union had more tanks than NATO.
Putin’s rule can only be understood against the background of the failure of the USSR. His policy aims at revision. For Putin, the cold war was and is a prelude to a hot war – just as it heats up or cools down “frozen” conflicts in Georgia, for example, as he sees fit.
Putin staged a state of emergency in 1999
The US and Europe are now taking their toll on the belief that more material prosperity would automatically lead to the rule of law and respect for human rights. For a long time, this approach shaped the Russia policy of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his successor Angela Merkel. The most visible expression was the close energy cooperation.
What was overlooked was that Putin is anything but a “flawless democrat”. As early as 1999 he staged the state of emergency after bomb attacks on residential buildings in Moscow.
He had troops march into Chechnya and reduce its capital, Grozny, to rubble. Putin’s métier has always been the state of emergency that he orchestrated. And that calls for escalation.
This is all the more true since Putin, unlike China’s leadership, is not even thinking about permanently increasing the prosperity of the population. Moscow and Petersburg’s dissatisfied middle class therefore demonstrated in 2012 against his third presidency. In 2014, Putin sent Russia into a nationalist frenzy with the annexation of Crimea.
It wasn’t NATO’s eastward expansion – based on the NATO-Russia Founding Act – that made him attack Ukraine in 2014. It was the Ukrainians’ rejection of the Eurasian Economic Union and their plea for association with the European Union. Russia’s soft power had lost to that of the EU. Putin responded with hard power.
Meanwhile, the Russian people are impoverished. Everything that came into the country in terms of income from the commodity trade flowed into the military and into the pockets of the oligarchs. Since the annexation of Crimea, per capita gross domestic product has fallen below $10,000 – lower than in China and the poorest EU country, Romania.
Russia cannot occupy Ukraine permanently
It is now clear that Putin’s blitzkrieg concept does not work in Ukraine. He may win the battle for Kyiv, even if that is far from certain. But he has already lost the war against the rest of the world.
Its economic and financial resources are unlikely to be sufficient for a permanent occupation of Ukraine – especially not in view of the devastating effect of Western sanctions. They send Russia back economically to the 1960s Soviet Union.
Of course, that’s not good news. A system of rule that only knows escalation through hard power as a way out of crises becomes all the more dangerous the more hopeless its situation seems. That is why NATO is well advised not to become a party to the war, despite all its support for Ukraine. Not because we could care less about the fate of Ukraine, but because entering the war would cause the number of victims to explode.
It is now necessary to rectify the Bundeswehr’s equipment deficiencies and to modernize them. During Merkel’s 16-year chancellorship, the German armaments budget almost matched Russia’s – but that’s not enough to provide the Bundeswehr soldiers stationed in Lithuania with warm underwear. Both are needed: better financial resources and an end to wasting money on procurement.
Decarbonization must be accelerated
But security for Europe is not limited to the military. Europe must become more resilient.
Germany in particular must reduce its dependence on fossil energy imports as quickly as possible. It is possible to reverse the ratio of imported and domestic energy so that we only have to import a quarter of our primary energy. The key to this is accelerated decarbonization – and the rapid ending of imports from Russia.
Some are afraid of going cold turkey, literally. Keep drinking for fear of a hangover has always been bad advice.
We can stop purchasing oil and coal from Russia by the end of the year. In addition, full gas storage facilities must be ensured and liquefied gas contracts that become available on the world market must be secured. The installation of heat pumps instead of gas heaters should be prescribed, renewable energies should be expanded and hydrogen production ramped up.
In view of the nuclear threshold lowered by Putin and the precarious situation in Ukrainian nuclear power plants, we should be happy about every nuclear power plant in Europe that is shut down – instead of ranting about life extensions.
Russia is not the Soviet Union. At the UN General Assembly, 141 countries recently called on Putin to end the war immediately. Only five states stood behind him. The USSR has never been so isolated.
The war in Ukraine also does not correspond to the economic interests of Putin’s partner China. It is now important for Europe to rebalance the relationship between hard power and soft power. Strategically, soft power will win.
The author: Jürgen Trittin is foreign policy spokesman for the Bundestag faction of Bündnis 90/Die Grünen. He was chairman of the party and in the government of Gerhard Schröder Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety.
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