It makes an impression to look out on the Moscow River from inside the Kremlin walls. The history, the power, the bloody internal settlements and the wars and invasions, somehow still speak to us from the newly renovated walls. Now Russia is once again fighting a new major war, started and wanted from inside these walls, with the aim of taking over a neighboring country. But Moscow does not resemble a city at war today, at least not when I visited it last November. In recent decades, the city has grown, become more prosperous, and the war felt further away there than anywhere else I have been in Europe since the war began in earnest on 24 February last year. KREMLIN: Foreign affairs editor Sigurd Falkenberg Mikkelsen in Moscow in the autumn of 2022. That is of course how the authorities want it, it is in the big cities and in particular Moscow that policy is decided. The less people notice about the carnage in Ukraine, the better. This will change when the Western sanctions start to hit harder, when the war economy goes beyond the consumer economy and if city boys also come home from the front in coffins. It may quickly become a reality that the Russian authorities have to deal with. At least there was nothing in President Vladimir Putin’s speech to the people this week that pointed in the direction of peace. In social media there are pictures from posters in the city that say “Russia’s borders end nowhere”. ACCUSING THE WEST: During his State of the Union address on February 21, Putin again placed responsibility for the war on the West. Photo: DMITRY ASTAKHOV / AFP Exactly that goes to the heart of the conflict and explains why the war has not only shaken Ukraine, but large parts of the world, even though it was not like that when the war began a year ago. The annexation of Crimea and the intervention in the east happened in 2014, and since then there has been war in Ukraine. It is easy to see in retrospect that Russia’s relationship with national borders is flexible, at least as long as it is to their own advantage. Putin said it himself in 2016 with a smile during a geography quiz for children. But until last year, the world allowed, albeit with protests and sanctions, that Russia intervened and messed with its neighboring countries, be it Georgia, Ukraine or Belarus. It was sort of part of the great power game where you give and take. It is easy to see in retrospect that this was a mistake, but perhaps not as easy to see exactly what should have been done differently. What makes 24 February 2022 such a shocking date in recent history is that no attempt was made to hide the use of force. It was an outright invasion of a neighboring country that we have not seen in Europe since Nazi Germany did the same in the 1930s. Since there was no particularly successful invasion either, a bloody trench war has raged for a whole year, parallel to gross abuses against the Ukrainian civilian population. BURNT OUT: A destroyed block of flats in Borodjanka outside Kyiv. Photo: LISI NIESNER / Reuters For the rest of Europe, the settlement after the Second World War was a final break with that type of politics. There is a clear before and after, and all European politics in retrospect has largely revolved around resolving conflicts in a different way than by taking up arms. That does not mean that conflicts or disagreements were gone, they were just not resolved with tanks on European soil. I think that’s why it was so difficult for politicians and public opinion to imagine that this could happen. Changing our worldview is one of the most demanding things we humans do. Even in Kyiv, the American message that a major war was imminent was not believed. But they know that now, and they have also known how to defend themselves after the initial shock had worn off. Western politicians also reacted quickly, many of them surprisingly quickly when you take history into account. I thought about this when I passed the illuminated monument in Berlin to the Soviet effort to win the Second World War, also last fall. It was strange to see a Soviet tank on a pedestal in the dark of night in the German capital, with Ukraine only a long drive away. It stands there as a liberation monument, but I wonder what the Germans are really thinking in light of what is happening now. FOR PEACE: From a demonstration in Berlin a few days after the invasion of Ukraine last year. Photo: Markus Schreiber / AP Chancellor Olaf Scholz gave a sensational speech to the Riksdag just three days after the invasion, in which he announced unequivocal support for Ukraine and the rearming of his own army. Yes, it has been slow, but Germany had as an underlying guideline to seek friendship and alliance with Russia after two devastating world wars. Therefore, Germany has had to change more fundamentally than any other European country. Further west, France also had to get rid of its slightly romantic notions about great power negotiations with Russia. Here at home, we changed a half-century-long practice of not sending weapons to a country at war without major political disagreements. The EU and the US also quickly agreed on a large sanctions package. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion either. Here there are different countries with different interests, and this cohesion and the ability to act and adjust policy after the invasion shows that democracies can also react quickly when needed. We will need that in the future. Because there are no obvious solutions to the war in Ukraine, nor is it the case that the whole world shares the West’s view of the war in Ukraine. Russia has been active in Africa to gather support there. In Latin America and the Middle East, people like to see this through anti-American glasses because of their own experiences with American power play. China, for its part, is looking for a role as an ally with Russia without wanting to go entirely on Russia’s side, at least so far. That may change, and it may seem that the Ukraine war has become the catalyst for a more divided world, with authoritarian states on one side and democracies on the other. It requires cleverness to prevent this conflict from slipping into an open and larger war. And it will require the ability to act in order to be well equipped to defend ourselves in a new and more brutal world. One year ago: Read also:
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