Sometimes it is necessary to look at events with the benefit of hindsight over decades, even centuries, to see clearly how effective were people’s efforts and the principles for which they stood.
However, at the four-year mark of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine (and 12 years after the annexation of Crimea), we have already seen enough time pass and sufficient destruction to grasp how history will look upon efforts to put a stop to it. Wherever you choose to look in the world, the last four years have been a farrago of failure and weakness.
Four years into the full-scale invasion, Europe is still ‘deeply concerned’ every day another Ukrainian family is murdered, every time an entire city is erased from existence. Europe endlessly ‘stands with Ukraine,’ a platitude as effective as sending a box of EU lapel pins to the front. In the space of four years, Europe could have fully mobilized a military strength to stop this aggression so that it does not overflow into the rest of the European continent. If this does erupt into a greater conflagration, it cannot be said that we did not bring it upon ourselves.
A recent social media post I stumbled across suggested that Spain should not increase its help to Ukraine, or its contribution to NATO, because ‘Spain has no enemies.’ This attitude is emblematic of a wider problem that has defined the response of much of Europe in the last four years. It is a view that can only thrive in nations enjoying the fruits of peace made possible by the sacrifices of others. If there is a single nation in the world opposed to democratic peace and willing to go to war to destroy it, then, if you have any principles aligned to the defence of free societies, you have an enemy.
There is no such thing as neutrality. A nation can only be neutral when the sons and daughters of its neighbours are willing to lay down their lives to halt devastation at their doorstep. Neutrality is cowardice masquerading as morality.
The EU cannot meet the challenge. An organisation built on the aspirations of compromise, conciliation, and regulations is the right one to decide on water quality standards, but not the right one to face up to armed military aggression. Nation-states of the European Continent must form a coordinated European defence alliance outside the EU, and this should already have been done with urgency and focus. So far, we have a Coalition of the Willing, but willing to do what?
The most powerful nation in the democratic world, the United States, has swayed like a blade of grass in the wind. One moment recoiling from supporting Ukraine when it had the benefit of momentum, then transitioning to withholding support while many Ukrainians lose their lives. All so the current administration could experiment with the idea of negotiating successfully with an invader, a strategy that has proven to be as futile as the expansive bounty of human history should have made obvious.
Just when the world needed to defend national borders and repudiate the use of military force to change them, Trump threatened the invasion of Greenland, pulling the rug out from under Ukrainians in the critical moment when standing loyal to these principles is existential for them.
There is no omniscient mind in a vat that controls what the democratic world thinks. Every country has the agency to respond. It is the absence of decisive leadership in the democratic world’s component states, and especially insufficient coordination, that has been conspicuous.
One mystery that will stagger future generations – and probably encourage a long stream of doctoral dissertations – will be the failure of Western powers to come to Ukraine’s aid despite the prodigious means at its disposal. Even accepting a decision not to send troops (itself surprising given Russia’s unhesitant willingness to send North Korean troops into battle), it will baffle future historians as to why the Western alliance was not even able, at a bare minimum, to neutralize missiles and drones slamming into Kyiv.
It is difficult to find reliable numbers on the total military expenditure since the founding of NATO in 1949, but by any estimates, it is likely to be tens of trillions of dollars. The US contribution to NATO since 1949 is thought to exceed $20 trillion. The democratic alliance has assembled the most powerful military force in the history of civilization. What was the point of this vast effort to defend freedom?
Even accepting an argument that the West was reluctant to involve NATO directly on Ukrainian land, the collective resources of the US and Europe alone could have thwarted this war long before now, even outside of NATO structures, if they had been applied with determination and clear-headedness.
Time and money cannot be what was lacking. Historians will infer the only explanation that seems plausible. The West was paralysed by fear and cowardice from putting an end to this barbarity. It will be the only possible explanation. They will be correct.
Beyond Europe, shame upon those nations that have, over decades, railed against colonialism — the major nations of Asia and Africa. In taking sides with the instigator in this patently colonial war of aggression, or even in claiming neutrality, they have undone any claim to be the defenders of a world that has grown beyond the age of empires.
In refusing to take a stand against the attack on Ukraine, and in some cases actively aiding it, they have turned their backs on the afflictions and depredations endured by previous generations of their citizens who would have expected better than an implicit nod to a new era of imperialism merely for the satisfaction of needling erstwhile colonizers in the West.
Then there are the institutions that stand outside nation-states, whose very purpose was to hold the line against aggression. Article 1, Section 1 of the United Nations Charter states that it will “take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace.” Before we argue about whether its measures have been effective, we might debate whether the UN has taken any measures at all, even a minimal stand on moral principles, against what has happened.
In all parts of the world, Ukraine has been failed. From Europe, our appeasement and inability to grasp the seriousness of the war and its implications for the future of European security and peace. From the US, a diffidence followed by a naive attempt to broker a peace against the hard realities of Russia’s motives. From Asia and Africa, meek complicity and a desire to weaken the West. From supranational organizations, silence. If humanity’s objective has been to compile an encyclopaedia of the kaleidoscopic ways in which a nation can be let down, it has assembled a rich tome.
History cannot be rewritten. What is done is done. The four-year anniversary of the full-scale invasion is a shameful anniversary. For a civilization with the ability to transmit the totality of human knowledge to everyone through a device the size of a hand, it is an abnegation of our supposed state of development.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.