HELSINKI — One year ago, on the day Russia invaded Ukraine and launched a devastating European war, Finland’s President Sauli Niinisto declared: “Now the masks are gone. You only see the cold face of war”.
The Finnish leader had met President Vladimir V. Putin many times over the years, in line with Finland’s policy of pragmatic rapprochement with Russia, a country with which it shares a border of almost 1,350 kilometers. Yet that policy was suddenly shattered, and with it, Europe’s illusions of normality under Putin.
The 27-nation European Union was built over decades on the central idea of spreading peace across the continent. The notion that economic exchanges, trade and interdependence were the best guarantees against war lay deep in the postwar European psyche, even in dealings with an increasingly hostile Moscow.
That Putin’s Russia had become aggressive, imperialist, vindictive and brutal was almost impossible to swallow in Paris or Berlin, even after the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
“Many of us started taking peace for granted,” Niinisto said last month at the Munich Security Conference after leading Finland’s abrupt 2022 push to join NATO, something inconceivable even in 2021. “Many of us had guard down.”
The war in Ukraine has transformed Europe more profoundly than any other event. since the end of the Cold War in 1989. A peace mentality, sharper in Germany, has given way to a growing awareness that military might is necessary in the pursuit of security. A continent on autopilot has become a major effort to save freedom in Ukraine, a freedom seen as synonymous with itself.
Gone is the discussion about the size of tomatoes or the shape of bananas acceptable in Europe; instead, there is debate over which tanks and possibly F-16 fighter jets to give kyiv. The European Union has provided some $3.8 billion in military assistance to Ukraine.
In total, European states have committed more than $50 billion in various forms of aid to Kiev, imposed 10 rounds of sanctions, welcomed more than 8 million Ukrainian refugees, and largely disassociated themselves from Russian oil and gas in radical change under acute inflationary pressure.
“Zeitenwende,” or epochal turning point, is the term German Chancellor Olaf Scholz used nearly a year ago in a speech announcing a $112 billion investment in the German military. He said it for Germany, but the word also applies to a continent where the possibility of nuclear war no longer seems impossible.
“The war has sent Europeans back to basics, to questions of war and peace and our values. It asks us: who are we as Europeans?” said François Delattre, the French Ambassador to Germany.
According to Putin, the Europeans were part of a decadent West, devoid of any mettle. He was wrong, one of several mistakes that have undermined a Russian invasion that was supposed to end in days.
Still, if Europe has held its ground, its acute dependence on the United States has once again been on display. The US has provided Ukraine with some $30 billion worth of weapons and military equipment since the war began, dwarfing the European contribution.
Without the US, the heroic Ukraine of President Volodymyr Zelensky might not have had the military wherewithal to resist the Russian invasion. This is a sobering thought for Europeans, even if Europe’s response has exceeded many expectations. It is a measure of the work that still needs to be done if Europe is to become a credible military power.
In short, the war has laid bare the path Europe faces: how to transform itself from a power of peace to a muscular geopolitical protagonist.
Now the fault line in Europe is not as stark as the Berlin Wall once was, and it is further east, but it is there.
There is no doubt that it is in Vaalimaa, the border crossing between Finland and Russia. Once known for its long lines, today it is a ghostly place. Its vast nearby commercial emporiums were left deserted. It is no longer a place of connection, but talks about a new European division.
“Even if the war ends soon, there will be no going back,” Sinikukka Saari, a Russia expert, said in Finland.
By: ROGER COHEN
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6592732, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-03-01 23:40:08
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