the war that has forced the EU to reinvent itself

When the war is over, the world will no longer be as it was to be.. It is still too early to assess the full effects, but the invasion that Russia launched in Ukraine more than 300 days ago has dynamited international architecture built after the end of the Cold War in the same way as the First World War left a broken map and with the great Empires brain dead, and the Second World War split the planet into two large blocks.

That was probably not the main objective of the Russian president, Vladimir Putinwhen he decided to launch a large-scale military attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. He wanted and hoped to seize the neighboring territory, deprive it of its sovereignty, turn it into a failed state and place a puppet Moscow government in just 72 hours.

An ambitious plan that failed, taking by the wayside tens of thousands of lives and forcing more than seven million peopleaccording to UNHCR data, to leave their home in what is one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes since the middle of the last century.

months of fierce Ukrainian resistance fueled by the financial and weapons support of the West have managed to stop (and even reverse) the chaotic advance of Russia on the battlefield. Outside of it, the conflict has forced Europe to radically review some of its founding principles and beliefs.

there was no end to the story

“One of the lessons that this conflict teaches us is that there never was an end to history,” he says. Sight Milosevich-Juaristi, main researcher at the Elcano Royal Institute, an expert in Russia. She refers to the thesis that historians such as Francis Fukuyama defended after the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, and who spoke of how stopping war conflicts would give rise to a stable peaceful period.

“Russia has never managed to integrate into the international system and we see that now, as we also see that the disintegration of the USSR has not been peaceful,” he explains. Milosevich-Juaristi to SPANISH.

“There was no end to history; Russia has never been integrated into the international system created at the end of the 90s”

Mira Milosevich-Juaristi, principal investigator at the Elcano Royal Institute

Throughout the contest, Putin has used a whole string of arguments to justify what today he continues to call “special military operation”. These range from “Ukraine is ruled by neo-Nazis” to “NATO is cornering Russia” to “the need to liberate the Russians from the Donbass region.”

[Las 5 burdas mentiras con las que Putin justifica la invasión de Ucrania]

None of these, however, reaches the weight that the historical argument has. The one that comes to defend, in a reinterpretation of history to suit the consumer, that Ukraine is a fictitious state that it must return to what it was: a territory within Russia. “We return to a 19th century dynamic of the struggle for territories and the use of historical arguments,” says the Elcano researcher, who recalls that this is also -and above all- “trench warfare“.

In recent years, the European Union (EU) has strengthened its cyber defense policies. And although the conflict has also jumped into cyberspace -in April the Ukrainian president, Volodímir Zelenski, announced the creation of an army of Information Technology-, the truth is that blood is shed in the real world.

“Deterrence has failed in Europe and we have realized that we must change the approach based on security for that of defense,” concludes Milósevic. Along these lines, Diego López Garrido, former Secretary of State for the EU underlines in the book Towards a new world order? (Deusto, 2022) how Europe has realized the need “to build a more resilient common security and defense policycohesive and based on autonomous decision-making” that is compatible with NATO.

The rearmament of Europe

One of the most obvious consequences of the war in Ukraine is, precisely, the remilitarization of Europe, which “has made an unprecedented budgetary and political commitment to rearmament,” as he explains. Carmen Colominaprincipal researcher at CIDOB specializing in the European Union, to this newspaper.

This movement was unthinkable until recently. However, the images of Russian tanks marching from Belarus towards Ukraine created such a feeling of vulnerability that many countries have modified their foreign policies. Some even turning 180 degrees.

“Until now, the EU relied more on its ability to seduce than on its ability to deter”

Carme Colomina, CIDOB researcher

Germany is perhaps the most paradigmatic case. After more than eight decades of disarmament, the government of Olaf Scholz approved overnight the release of a fund of 100,000 million euros to improve the conditions of his rickety army.

The Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and Poland have followed the same line. In order to deal with the threats that could come from their eastern neighbor, they have decided to invest billions of euros to increase its defense spending in the coming years. “This is a change in the very nature of the EU, which until now relied more on its ability to seduce than on its ability to deter,” says Colomina.

[El ejército de 35.000 civiles armados que Polonia adiestra contra Rusia]

The decision of Finland and Sweden to abandon their historic neutrality and join NATO is also another example of the shared perception of insecurity that has taken hold in European territory. And not only that: it also certifies the momentum that transatlantic alliances have taken.

Isolation and the nuclear letter

On the other side of the scale is Russia. In less than a year, the country led by Putin has been condemned by the United Nations General Assembly, to which it belongs, for the “illegal” annexation of four regions of eastern Ukraine, designated a state promoter of terrorism by the European Parliament, and exiled of the G20 summit.

Added to this isolation is an increasingly evident distancing from those who until now were his closest collaborators. As EU and US sanctions fell like a stone on the Russian economy, China, India and Turkey They were distancing themselves, to a greater or lesser extent, from the war.

[La era del rearme nuclear: aumentan los arsenales de todo el mundo por primera vez tras la Guerra Fría]

They have not stopped, yes, aligning themselves commercially. They do not support him, but they buy from Moscow the energy that the West has given up. Against this increasingly bleak outlook, the Kremlin has used the nuclear card on numerous occasions.

Vladimir Putin may never follow through on his threats, but that’s the least of it: the world has already heard them. Hence, a report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has described 2022 as the first year since the Cold War in which the nuclear powers are preparing to increase their atomic arsenals.