Can Europe Break Out of the NATO War in Ukraine?
Vijay Prashad
THERE need not have been a war in Ukraine. The Russian government had made it clear almost two decades ago that it would not tolerate the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) eastward. In 1990, before the fall of the USSR and when the two parts of Germany had negotiated their unification, it had been made clear to the Soviets that NATO would not go beyond the eastern border of Germany. After the fall of the USSR in 1991, NATO violated that agreement and began to absorb states along the border of Russia. This NATO expansion toward Russia, along with the unilateral exit of the US from arms control treaties, is at the heart of the war in Ukraine.
By 2004, two sets of countries east of Germany had joined NATO: the Visegrád Group (Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland) by 1996, and then between 2001 and 2009 the Vilnius Group (Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) all joined NATO. Two countries that border Russia – Estonia and Latvia – became part of the NATO alliance. Russia twice tried to join NATO, once in 1991 and then in 2000. But this did not occur. Instead, in 2002, the two sides created a NATO-Russia Council to mediate any differences.
Already, by 2001, Russia began to fear that the worries it had for its security had not been taken seriously in the west. These developments were the prelude for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference, when he said that the world could not tolerate ‘one single master’. If Russian security had been taken seriously between 1991 and 2007, there would have been no war in Ukraine.
CREATION OF A DEEP CRISIS
Indeed, rather than consider the concerns that emanated from Moscow, the west went on a rampage to undermine any confidence that the Russians might have about peace with the west. The first salvo was fired in December 2001, when US president George W Bush told the Russians that the US was unilaterally withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972). This breakdown of the negotiated treaties to prevent a nuclear exchange escalated as Donald Trump unilaterally terminated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987). With the collapse of both treaties, the Russians openly said that they feared that the US would absorb more of its bordering countries into NATO and station intermediate-range nuclear missiles in those countries, from where they could strike major Russian cities (Moscow, St. Petersburg).
It became a pressing concern for Russia that the United States seemed so eager to bring both Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. In early 2008, US President George W Bush announced openly that he wanted these two countries in NATO; this statement came alongside the US announcement that it would build an anti-ballistic missile station in Poland – which means that it would station missiles in Poland – and a radar station in the Czech Republic. These movements by the US seemed to clarify for Moscow that the United States planned to either attack Russia, which would be suicidal given that both are nuclear powers, or to try and weaken Russia in some way. In response to Bush’s statement, Russian deputy foreign minister Grigory Karasin said that if Ukraine was brought into NATO, it would create a ‘deep crisis’ in Russian-Ukrainian relations.
That warning from 2007 (from Putin) and from 2008 (from Karasin) went unheeded. The United States eagerly pursued its policy of harassing Russia along its borders. Ukraine could have joined the European Union without joining NATO, but both the United States and the European Union seemed eager to bring Ukraine into NATO.
And it is here that the illogical attitude of Europe is manifest. Before 2022, more than 40 per cent of Europe’s imported natural gas needs came from Russia, with Germany being the largest gas customer; Austria and Latvia relied upon Russia for 80 per cent of their gas needs. It would have behoved these countries to insist on a modus vivendi with Russia rather than on the path toward aggravation and conflict. Not one of these countries which relied so heavily on Russian gas put their foot down on the brakes; each of them accelerated their belligerence toward war.
POSSIBILITIES OF PEACE
It is a fact that Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, but to believe that this is the start of the conflict is to foreshorten the historical imagination. From 2014 onward, Russia insisted that Crimea was a part of Russia (and so it was annexed by March 2014) and it decried Ukraine’s closure of the water pipes into Crimea; it insisted that the Donbass region should be given autonomy and not threatened by Ukrainian neo-fascists and that the Russian minority in Ukraine should be protected. These issues could very well have been negotiated between Moscow and Kyiv, but the United States insisted that its Ukrainian allies reject any overture from Moscow.
Ukrainian comedian Volodymyr Zelensky ran for office on the platform of better relations with Russia, for which he received a substantial mandate (75 per cent of the vote) in the 2019 presidential elections. In the previous four elections, the winner won by winning only half the votes (in 2010, Viktor Yanukovych won with only 49.55 per cent). Zelensky’s mandate could have ensured a new dialogue between Moscow and Kyiv. Indeed, Zelensky pushed through a bill to curtail the power of Ukraine’s oligarchs, and he began a process of negotiations with Russia over the Donbass. Zelensky went to the Donbass and pleaded with the neo-fascist insurgents to put down their arms and come to the table. But he failed. This failure on his part and the pressure from the United States not to negotiate with Moscow forced the conflict to escalate and to draw the Europeans into an impossible crisis.
Russia’s military action in February 2022 did not end the negotiations. In fact, in the early weeks after Russian troops entered the Donbass, Ukraine and Russia held a series of meetings in Turkey and Belarus to settle the outstanding issues. When they got close to a deal, Britain and the United States intervened to block any further movement. US defence secretary came to Kyiv and said that the endgame was for Russia to be ‘weakened’. The bar was set by the United States at a level that was rationally unreachable. Ukraine must live beside Russia. It cannot be transplanted to Ohio. That means Ukraine must make an agreement with Russia. Weakening Russia might work as an endgame for the United States, but it was never going to work as an endgame for Ukraine or even for the countries that were reliant upon Russian energy sales.
NATO’s WAR
The ridiculous war aim – weaken Russia – meant that the United States and its European allies were now responsible for ensuring that Ukraine would not lose the conflict. Over the past two years, the United States funded Ukraine to the tune of at least 200 billion dollars, while the European Union and its member states provided at least 121 billion dollars to Kyiv (with a pledge to get to 162 billion dollars by the end of the year). It is worthwhile to point out that the GDP of Ukraine in 2022 was 160 billion dollars.
Europe’s collusion in the war in Ukraine has also meant pressure to increase the domestic military budgets to 2 per cent of GDP, a catastrophically high amount for most countries who are already facing a problem with the increased energy bill (due to the absence of Russian natural gas) and due to the general austerity due to the diminished resources for their populations as more and more money goes to warmaking. Some of these increases are remarkable: Sweden spent 1.42 per cent of GDP for the military in 2021, joined NATO in 2024, and now spends 2.14 per cent of its GDP on warmaking. Across Europe, there has been an 18 per cent increase in military spending. In August 2024, the European Union noted, ‘This is not the moment to weaken our support to Ukraine. Ukraine can only defeat Putin’s aggression if it stands firmly on two legs of American and European support’.
GERMAN CONTRADICTIONS
Before the ink on these words could dry, Germany’s government said that it would start to reduce its commitments to Ukraine. In late August, finance minister Christian Lindner said that his government would veto any additional financial requests for Kyiv. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ‘clarification’ that Germany would not give up on Ukraine did not have the desire impact. It is clear that Germany – one of the leading European backers of the Ukrainian war effort – is getting cold feet.
This hesitation over funds for Ukraine comes for two reasons. First, there is an expectation that whoever wins the US presidential elections in November is going to seek to pivot away from this conflict with Russia, which has already borne results that could become permanent (Europe has subordinated itself to the United States in strategic terms, and Europe is now buying US-produced Liquified Natural Gas instead of piped gas from Russia). Second, the establishment parties in power in many of the key European states (France, Germany) fear that Left and far-right parties with positions against the war in Ukraine are making decisive gains and might change the political orientation against the establishment.
Certainly, in the German regional elections in the east of the country (in Saxony and Thuringia) and in the centre (Brandenburg), the ruling Social Democrats are facing a major blow. Those who will gain are the far-right Alliance for Deutschland (polling near 30 per cent) and the new Left-wing party the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). The BSW was formed by former Die Linke leader Sahra Wagenknecht after she could not prevent her former party drift away from its working-class roots into Left liberalism. Die Linke, meanwhile, barely registers in the polls. The BSW is firmly against Germany’s support for NATO’s war and is indeed an anti-NATO political project (its party leader, Sevim Dagdelen, has just published a book with LeftWord Books on NATO and its ugly history – NATO: A Reckoning with the Atlantic Alliance, 2024).
The BSW has said that it will not support any plan to host US medium-range missiles in Germany, which has been put on the table by the Social Democratic-Green government. Germany is currently building its first overseas military base since 1945. This will be in Lithuania, near the border with Belarus, with the plan that it would host 4,000 Bundeswehr troops by 2027. The balance of forces in Germany is rapidly turning against this kind of militarism.
The same atmosphere is evident in France, where the popular front bloc that includes La France insoumise and the Communist Party made substantial gains against the centrist forces in the recent parliamentary elections. This popular front bloc has taken a stand against further escalation of the war in Ukraine, although it has not come out frontally against French support. This might change with BSW’s gains in the provincial German elections. If the BSW is able to curtail and reverse Germany’s subordination to Washington, it will have a major impact across Europe for two reasons: first, because it would mean that the most important country on the continent has shifted course, and second, because it would give confidence to other political forces to stand up against both NATO and Washington with more clarity. The French bloc might follow suit.
The war in Ukraine continues, but the appetite for it even in Ukraine has dwindled. Europe is simply not going to be the doormat for US policy forever, if this means that European needs are going to have to be subordinated to those of the United States. Whether a new political will can grow in Europe is unclear. The German regional elections will be a bellwether. The outcome could be decisive.
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