It took a long time for Western governments to pull themselves together and lift the ban on Ukraine using weapons it received against Russian territory. Thankfully, that is now over, and in view of NATO’s concessions, Berlin too is forced to give up its peace policy reservations about the use of German weapons in Ukraine’s arsenal that could hit Russian territory.
Meanwhile, Russia is ramping up its propaganda against “the Nazi invasion” to hysterical proportions. The Kremlin is increasingly resorting to a horror scenario: Moscow will not back down from using tactical nuclear weapons “to defend Russian soil.”
Reach – Putin also needs maximum reach in a war that he is waging with the West, far beyond Ukraine. It is a psychological battle, using highly armed words, if not more.
Nevertheless, analogies with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 are not appropriate, as Putin is not taking the calculated steps that led the then Soviet leader Khrushchev to withdraw from the Caribbean island. He is playing with unpredictability and thereby stoking the desire for peace in circles whose nerves are not up to the challenge of nuclear rhetoric. In this way, he remains confident of victory, with the reach of the terrorist thrill on his side.
An EU election poster by the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance party – “War or peace? You now have the choice” – reveals how skillfully Wagenknecht uses the fear factor in her – and Putin’s – interest. We have known since February 24, 2022 that anyone who relies on Putin’s peace will always end up with war, just as Hitler’s invasion of Prague on March 15, 1939 put an end to the “peace” of Munich in September 1938.
The range of weapons in the war over Ukraine depends to a large extent on whether freedom still plays the role in the soul of the challenged West as it appears in Pericles’ famous dictum: “The secret of happiness is freedom, but the prerequisite of freedom is courage.” The courage to stand in the way of the criminal actions of a dictator and thus to consolidate one’s own security.
In his latest book, “Spring 1940: How People in Europe Experienced the Western Campaign,” author Raffael Scheck, who teaches history at Welby College in Maine, quotes a French officer as saying that “no Frenchman really knew what he was fighting for.” The meaning of freedom was forgotten in the years after 1918, and young people just “wanted to live and survive.” The same was true for large sections of English society.
Another reliable observer of those years, Friedrich Sieburg, in his memoirs of the pre-war period in France, called upon “the weakness of will of the people in France at the end of the 1930s” as a witness: “For the sake of the happiness of waking up tomorrow morning in the same world and being able to continue their familiar habits of life, they had risked their future. They had no sense of crises.”
The temptation to appease a trumpeting opponent is as powerful as ever. In this respect, at least, the West and NATO have learned from the past, even if they have taken hesitant steps. Another step would be necessary: to show the public the implications of Putin’s gamble, which are also destructive for Russia, and thereby deprive him of some of his reasoning that he is the only one with nuclear options.
Reach against reach: what Khrushchev knew, the limitation of every power by the other party, cannot be foreign to Putin. It is important to instill this truth in him. The rhetoric of the peace singers will not achieve this.