On Ukraine, ‘liberal’ war hawks make the far right look like peacemakers |
A victim of Russia’s brutal aggression that’s generating a proper humanitarian catastrophe this winter, Ukraine is also stuck between two kinds of Western populism. One is that of Donald Trump and his European far-right equivalents, who don’t care much about either Ukraine or the rules-based order, only their private interests. The other one is that of the anti-Russian (and anti-Trump) hawks who tend to wrap the cynical interests of the military-industrial complex in phoney liberal rhetoric as they pretend to defend the values they don’t truly adhere to — not in Ukraine anyway.
With the Munich Security Conference, Europe’s most important event for foreign policy and military experts, approaching, its longtime chairman, Wolfgang Ischinger, set the agenda regarding the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, which is shifting into its fifth year this month. As long as Ukraine defends Europe, he told the Tagesspiegel, the Russian threat to Europe isn’t huge, but once the war is over, it will increase enormously.
Even as he rushed to deny that he doesn’t want peace to be achieved any time soon, the message was clear: Ukraine is helping European countries to prepare for war with Russia (no matter how implausible this eventuality is looking now, given it presumes Kremlin rulers are essentially suicidal).
At least this is how the Ukrainian ambassador in Berlin, Andrii Melnyk, read Ischinger’s stance. The argument that “Ukraine should bleed out just to buy Europe more time for its own defence” was cynical, he told Ischinger on X. Ukrainians urgently need a ceasefire, insisted the ambassador.
Meanwhile, the idea that peace in Ukraine would be premature remains predominant in a few major European capitals, especially London, as........