In the early hours of 24 February 2022, Russian troops entered Ukraine. Later that day, the Russian navy captured Snake Island in Ukraine’s Black Sea waters. When the news broke, oil and European gas prices soared. The war that began, and continues to this day, has remade the continent of Europe, forcing European leaders to face the meaning of Ukraine’s national independence and accept Russia as a geopolitical antagonist rather than a critical energy supplier.
This realignment was most profound in the country that sits at modern Europe’s heart. In the event of the invasion, the stakes for Germany involved not only one unopened pipeline — the already-controversial Nord Stream 2 — but its 50-year commitment to rapprochement with Moscow. Within 72 hours, Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised to send German weapons to Ukraine, establish a €100 billion fund to increase military expenditure, and end energy dependency on Russia by opening the country to sea-borne gas. Since Putin had, Scholz told the German parliament, “demolish[ed] the European security order that had prevailed for almost half a century since the Helsinki Final Act” in 1975, everything had changed. “We are,” Scholz said, “living through a watershed era [eine Zeitenwende] … mean[ing] that the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before.”
In part the German chancellor was right. But Scholz’s version of why European history fractured in February 2022 also distorts reality. Self-evidently, the European security order before Russia’s war was nothing like the one that prevailed in the mid-Seventies: six new European states stood in the former western Soviet Union. Having no prior history of peacetime independence, Ukraine’s emergence in 1991 as Europe’s largest territorial state had constituted an extraordinary change.
But the new Ukrainian nation-state was always geopolitically precarious. Since at least 2009, Putin had openly denied the legitimacy of its existence. In the treaties Ukraine signed with Moscow during the Nineties, it ceded Russian military rights in Crimea. Then, in 2014, it lost the Crimean peninsula and entered a war against Russian-backed separatist rebels in the south-east of the country. If Russia’s invasion severed the present from the past, the shock was the scale of suffering Putin was willing to inflict to destroy Ukraine’s viability as an independent state, amplified by the chasm between the size of his initial ambition to seize power in Kyiv and a military mobilisation entirely inadequate to the task.
The unintended consequence for Europe is now clear: the emergence of a largely unified nation-state-in-arms with a pressing claim for EU membership that will prove hard to realise without concurrent Nato entry. Regardless of Ukraine’s prospects for entering either association with any alacrity, Ukraine’s resilience against Russia has rendered Ukrainian nationhood a crucial geopolitical fact. In a 1984 essay, the Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrote that the Ukrainian nation, “one of the great European nations… is slowly disappearing. And this enormous, almost unbelievable event is occurring without the world realising it”. Ukraine’s independence seven years afterwards only partly introduced western Europeans to Ukrainian history. But, by trying to eliminate Ukrainian nationhood, Putin has instead ensured that it has become a permanent feature of Europe with which the EU must grapple.
The post-Cold War EU relied on a measure of German-Russian reconciliation to allow for German reunification even as the eastern European states had only just successfully asserted their nationhood against the Soviet version of the imperial Russian empire. Thereafter, the Holocaust, as an end point for German nationalism and the catastrophic culmination of decades of ethnic division in eastern Europe, became pivotal to the imaginative construction of the idea of European unity. By contrast, in 2022, a state subject to the simultaneous experience of the Holocaust and Soviet mid-20th century terror became an official candidate for EU membership by fighting a defensive war for its territorial national sovereignty.
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