War is full of paradoxes because it doesn’t just destroy lives and wreck countries. In disrupting normality, it upends ordinary calculation. When rationality comes to mean whatever ensures survival, logic doesn’t remain the same. And Russia’s war on Ukraine, begun a year ago tomorrow, has been no exception.
This day last year, Volodymyr Zelensky was still a former comic turned Ukrainian president. He was committed to some reforms but he was also in the mould of his predecessors, overseeing a corrupt administration.
Vladimir Putin considered him insubstantial, someone who’d cut and run as soon as a relatively small Russian army invaded and crack paratroopers landed in an airport close to Kyiv.
So did the White House, which offered Zelensky safe passage. The CIA and Russian intelligence expected Russia to conquer Kyiv in days, as did French and German intelligence services.
It’s why Germany signalled that, in case of an invasion, it would not suspend the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project nor would it allow Estonia to give Ukraine military equipment that had briefly belonged to Germany. It’s why the SWIFT ban on Russian banks was not initially countenanced by Italy. It was a meeting with Zelensky that persuaded Mario Draghi, Italy’s then prime minister.
The first paradox is that the war has turned Zelensky into a figure of heroic strength. He did not just mobilise Ukrainian resilience. In ordinary times he was a venal politician who was lectured by visiting Europeans about good governance.
In a time of war, he now lectures their parliaments about what aid they need to give and how soon he expects EU membership for his country. And the European representatives pose with him for photos and try to borrow some of his aura.
The second paradox concerns how European weakness is being translated into strength. It was NATO’s lack of situational awareness that enabled Putin to launch a war that some had been predicting for years. But, now, Putin has strengthened the alliance.
With the exception of those two non-NATO members, Sweden and Finland, European armed forces have been systemically downsized. But that has meant there has been much spare military equipment to pass on to the Ukrainians.
The third paradox is the opposite of the second. It concerns how European strength is being translated into weakness.
The war is being hailed as Europe’s apotheosis – a coming home for Ukraine, a final reunification, one further step for the spread of liberal democracy.
It’s said repeatedly that this is a war of democracies against authoritarianism. But the rallying cry for enlightenment turns out to be an advertisement for European insularity, unless Brazil and India, both circumspect about taking sides, are now non-democracies.
There’s worse. Free, probing media are a fundamental pillar of a free society. But this war has seen many media organisations behave like foot soldiers of the information war. We have been told that Putin needs to be fought because he’s ill and crazy; but we’re also told that we can contemplate a decisive victory because he’s rational enough not to start a nuclear war.
The EU, which has always defined itself by its ability to engender peaceful coexistence, is now defining itself by a war- Ranier Fsadni
Then there are the attacks on free speech. Reasonable critics of current Western strategy are smeared as appeasers or Putin apologists. You can be forgiven for thinking that, in defending freedom from authoritarian dictators, as we should, we may end up destroying it.
The fourth paradox is that the EU, which has always defined itself by its ability to engender peaceful coexistence, is now defining itself by a war. But it’s a war whose terms are being dictated by others, highlighting Europe’s junior-partner status.
Angela Merkel has revealed how, some 15 years ago, her reservations (and those of then French president Nicolas Sarkozy) concerning western policy towards Ukraine were overridden by the US. Over the past year, Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz have had repeatedly to swallow their words as soon as they tried to follow an independent line.
It doesn’t matter whether you believe that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was blown up by Russia or the US. The fact is that a strategic trading choice by the EU’s largest member state was cancelled imperiously by another power.
The point isn’t whether that strategic choice was wise. It’s about who gets to decide. There’s nothing more strategic, for the EU, than deciding whether Ukraine should be accepted as an EU member and how long that should take. The way things are going, the EU may end up not having much latitude over a matter that could affect its entire identity.
A negotiated end to what has become a war of attrition will involve a quid pro quo. As early as April last year, Zelensky had already accepted ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine, while Putin withdrew his objections to EU membership.
If the US decides it can go along with this – in time to end a war of attrition before the 2024 presidential election campaign – the EU will go along with a deal that will probably involve a shorter period of pre-accession reforms (years, rather than decades) than a state with Ukraine’s many problems would ordinarily require.
Those problems include endemic corruption and weak rule of law. If membership is accelerated as part of a peace plan, they won’t be solved by the time of accession. The “victory” over authoritarianism on Europe’s border may well come at the price of strengthening the anti-rule-of-law forces within.
It needn’t come to pass. But we have a better chance of stopping it if, aware it might, we’re more sceptical of jingoism and recognise war’s paradoxes.