Introduction to the special issue on the Russo-Ukrainian War: A new European war? Considerations on the Russo-Ukrainian War

Abstract

The Russo-Ukrainian War marks a significant moment in the post-1945 history of Europe when a new European war has begun that will shape relations with Russia for a long time to come. This war is not a regional war but is a product of the divergent and seemingly irreconcilable paths of the Russian Federation and Ukraine that go back to the collapse of the USSR while the critical juncture was the Iraq war, which set the terms for the current collapse in normative internationalism. The question of military support – its extent and duration – for Ukraine has major implications for the future of Europe. The moral and political challenges for Europe should not be confused with the interests of US foreign policy, which is using Ukraine for purposes that have little to do with what Europe should be concerned with, namely justice and peace.

In writing this introduction to the special issue on the war in Ukraine, I can’t help recalling a previous special issue in 2001 of this journal that I co-edited on the war in Kosovo in the late 1990s as a sequel to the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. ¹ This war began in 1998 when the Serbian army controlled by Slobodan Milošević fought a brutal war against the largely Muslim Albanian Kosovans. Along with the Bosnian war and the genocide in Srebrenica, it was one of the major instances of ethnic cleansing in post-war European history. It ended in June 1999 following a successful military intervention by NATO and the arrest and indictment of Milošević for war crimes against humanity. Some of the problems the war raised are pertinent to the present war in Ukraine. In that special issue 22 years ago the contributors worked with the idea that recent wars and violence are to be analysed in the context of a major transformation in our sociopolitical situation arising from the end of the Cold War. As in many cases of major conflicts, a very fundamental factor is how the various protagonists interpret their situation, itself the product of historical forces but always contingent on the action of the actors involved. The global context is also always present, now more than ever.

In an important article, one of his last publications, in that issue the German philosopher of social science Karl-Otto Apel (2001) grappled with the question of what normative yardsticks are available to deal with a situation where the violation of international order fails to provide a legal solution to the problem of preserving peace and protecting human rights. But despite the relevance of this normative problem, the Russian invasion of Ukraine raises different questions and has led to a far greater crisis of security and one that comes in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic and increased consciousness of the ecological crisis. The Kosovo War arose in the context of the collapse of the Yugoslavian state leading to the explosion of violent nationalisms, most notably Serbian nationalism. The irredentist nature of this nationalism has some similarity with Russian nationalism with which it is related, in that both make claims to a supposedly historical source of the nation outside the territory of the state. ² However, the Russian Federation, in contrast, is not in imminent danger of collapse and its nationalism is driven by a much stronger and more dangerous revanchist neo-imperial ideology that meets with, if not considerable support, wide acquiescence within the Russian population. The Kosovo War came to an end in a little over a year, but it does not look like there will be an end to the current war in the foreseeable future.

The western states supplying arms to Ukraine are caught in a trap of needing to provide sufficient arms for Ukraine to defend itself while not increasing them to an extent that will lead them into outright war with the Russian Federation. Unless either side wins, which is unlikely for some time, this is a recipe for a long-lasting frozen war without winners. Not least given the lack of agreement on what winning means and the absence of an exit strategy for the Russian Federation, it is very likely to become an on-going war of attrition morphing into a semi-permanent frozen conflict with the ever-present threat of nuclear war. It is in many ways an ‘old war’ of one country invading another sovereign state to seize its territory, and it resembles other territorial interstate wars, such as Iraq–Iran War of 1980s. Nonetheless, the Russo-Ukrainian War bears many similarities with what Mary Kaldor (2012) described in a now classic book in 1999 as the ‘new wars’, namely the targeting of populations as opposed to the war aims of the older wars of the past. ³ Although her focus was more on civil wars, ethno-politics and predatory warlords which are the main features of new wars, the techniques of warfare employed by the armies of the Russian Federation, including the destruction of cities and deployment of mercenaries and private armies, are very similar. In her article in this special issue, she develops her perspective on ‘new wars’ with the important insight that they contribute to a long-term fragmented social condition arising from chaos and criminality (Kaldor, 2023). In this scenario, as she argues, ‘winning’ for Putin may be in reducing Ukrainian society to a fragmented sectarian violent condition. Europe will be plunged into a long-term crisis of instability if this happens.

Whatever position one takes on the question of military support for Ukraine, there can be little question that major crimes against humanity have been committed by the armies of the Russian Federation (the kidnapping of children for ‘re-education’ in Russia, the torture and execution of prisoners, the destruction of cities such as Mariupol razed to the ground, rape, the indiscriminate shelling of civilians, forced population displacement). ⁴ Now that the International Criminal Court has indicted the President of Russia, the shadow of these crimes will be cast over relations between the Russian Federation and Europe for a very long time to come, for whatever the political outcome of the war will be, the legal process will continue its course until those indicted will be arrested and put on trial in Den Haag.

The following may be a Europe-centred account to the extent that this is where the war is being fought and where it will be won and lost. Despite the European specificity, one must not lose sight of the wider global context and that due to US involvement there is another game being played out into which Europe is being drawn due to its dependence on NATO for defence. Although I do not see an ultimate clash of interests between Europe and the United States, there is nonetheless a tension insofar as the latter is a global superpower and, since Trump, a very unstable one. I am also aware that critical positions on the war, including those in this special issue, inevitably reflect where one stands, politically and geographically. However, there are also moral issues relating to justice and peace that need to be addressed.

A new European war

This special issue begins with the recognition that the Russo-Ukrainian War is a significant event, especially for Europe, which is witnessing the end of the relatively peaceful order established after 1945. The upheaval in Ukraine must also be seen as a continuation of the events of 1989/1990 and the transition to democracy in eastern and central Europe. It is now more apparent that the transition was not entirely peaceful and that the Kosovo War and other violent episodes in the aftermath of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia were not exceptions. It follows from this reasoning that the current war is not an aberration from an otherwise peaceful trajectory.

The uprising in Kyiv in November 2013, the so-called ‘EuroMaidan Uprising’ against the suppression of the Association Agreement with the EU and the subsequent Revolution of Dignity in February 2014, must be placed in the wider context of post-socialist transition and the delayed consolidation of democracy in Ukraine and its failed realization in the Russian Federation. ⁵ The protests in Ukraine in 2013/2014 are also a reminder of the protests in European cities against the disastrous war 20 years ago in Iraq in February 2003. In many ways, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is similar to the Anglo-American-led invasion of Iraq, except that the leaders of the former, US President Bush and UK Prime Minister Blair, were not indicted for the illegal war that they conducted, which led to over 300,000 civilian casualties, chaos, organized criminality on a gigantic scale and devastation of cities. It can only be hoped that Ukraine will not experience the same degree of destruction that befell on Iraq and, with Russian culpability, on Syria or the terror it unleashed twice on Chechnya. ⁶

Current calls for the war to end raise many questions. Opposition to war does not mean that peace must be at any price – it must also be a just peace rather than one achieved through appeasement and living with tyranny. This is where the war in Ukraine is complicated since the question of military intervention arises to provide assistance to Ukraine: who should provide it, what should be provided and for how long? As the war drags on and with rising fatalities, these questions cannot be ignored.

It is certainly more than a regional war and it is not a civil war. How should it be named and referred to? I do not think we need to take seriously the notion of a ‘special military operation’. The notion of the ‘War in Ukraine’ implicitly suggests civil war. ‘The Russian invasion of Ukraine’ is generally preferred by Ukrainian activists. However, this does not capture the wider reality of there being a war. On balance, though both are legitimate, the most appropriate term, I suggest, is ‘The Russo-Ukrainian War’, a term that is adopted by the Harvard historian of Ukrainian history, Serhy Plokhy and the title of a forthcoming book (Plokhy, 2023). However, Hauke Brunkhorst, in his contribution to this issue, sees the conflict more as a global war since, in his view, all wars today are part of a wider ‘world society’.

It is generally agreed that there has been a world-wide decline in interstate wars in recent times – the ‘old wars’ fought by one state against another – and a rise in intrastate wars, such as civil wars, and, what Zygmunt Bauman (2001) referred to in his contribution to the special issue on the Kosovo War, ‘globalization induced wars’, with these taking the form of what Kaldor calls ‘new wars’. In Europe, since 1945, a prominent example of an interstate war was the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, an invasion that did not have significant global implications comparable to the present war in Ukraine. The wars of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia) and the later Kosovo War can also be mentioned, for although these wars started as civil wars, they quickly turned into interstate wars. This is not to neglect the colonial wars the western European powers waged to retain their colonies nor the military interventions of the USSR in central Europe in 1956 and 1968. Nonetheless, within the western European context, the post-1945 period was largely an era of relative peace, despite the survival of dictatorships in Portugal and Spain until the late 1970s. But major wars between the European states ceased and no one suspected a possible attack from the Russian Federation after 1991, though the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 should have sent a signal. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, first in 2014 with the invasion of Crimea and the Donbas region and then a full assault on Kyiv in 2022 marks an end to that period of relative peace and stability, which already in effect had ended with the Iraq war, which I argue must be linked to the current Russo-Ukrainian War in eroding the conditions of a normatively grounded international order.

This new war is perhaps a serious wakening call to the reality of war as a seemingly permanent feature of modernity: Europe is once again witnessing a major war in a country in line to join the EU and is unsure how to respond. Denial is no longer possible, but self-deception is easier and for now the United States is providing the necessary defence. However, Europe cannot rely either on its own resolution or on an unstable United States. The war may have galvanized European unity against an enemy, but underlying this new found unity is a deeper sense of uncertainty and anxiety. Ukraine today is in much the same existential situation that Britain was in 1940 or the Second Republic in Spain in 1936 or, perhaps a better example, Finland in 1939, when it resisted Stalin’s attempt for forcible incorporation into the USSR. This is not to neglect the ‘Great Patriotic War’ when the USSR itself was fighting for its life against the Nazi invasion (a situation that is now paradoxically reversed with the erstwhile victim now the perpetrator). The old questions around appeasement are once again being asked and what the price of peace is, who is going to provide it and for how long might it last. It is almost certainly the case that the war will define security for Europe for a long time to come. A fundamental question is whether the EU is able to set its own agenda separately from the United States and NATO. At the moment it is evident that Europe cannot defend itself without NATO and it is also clear that it is not enough to be a ‘soft power’ when faced with a revanchist hard power, as Jan Zielonka also argues in his contribution to this issue. Too much of the debate is about the West versus Russia, which is where President Putin wants it. However, within the category of the West there are many different positions that are currently confused. European security interests need to be separated – where they differ – from the interests of the United States. ⁷ Nuclear deterrence clearly does not work and it is unlikely NATO would strike Russia with nuclear weapons in the event of retaliation when the overwhelming force of its conventional weapons would be more effective.

The project of European integration was based on certain presuppositions that are now in crisis. It began in the context of the Cold War and it was never envisaged to be much more than an association of western states to pursue economic cooperation within a framework of limited political coordination. The abiding motto of nie wieder Krieg, ‘war never again’, is now looking little more than a slogan as we enter a period in which the line separating peace and war is blurred. The EU’s eventual enlargement first in the 1980s to include the former southern dictatorships in the Iberian Peninsula and Greece and later the incorporation of the countries of the former Warsaw pact was immensely successful, despite the range of problems that have arisen in recent years with the single currency, Brexit, right-wing populism and neo-fascism, an authoritarian Hungary. Now, while the current crisis of the EU can be read in various ways, one problem that has come to the fore is that it was never intended to be a military power, for war was supposed to be a thing of the past. Europe relied on NATO for defence during the Cold War, secure in the knowledge that NATO would not be needed. That rationale vanished, or so it seemed, after 1989/1990, and a new one arose in the context of conflicts best exemplified by the Kosovo War, where, as mentioned, it made a fairly successful intervention. Despite Russian support for Serbia, there was no significant fall-out over Kosovo. Since the demise of the USSR and the formation of the Russian Federation in 1991 it seemed that the age-old hostility between the West and Russia was over in what appeared to be a new era of neoliberal globalization that required only peacekeeping missions. The USSR endorsed the UN-sanctioned intervention in Kuwait during the Gulf War to repel Iraq’s invasion in 1990. The relative political harmony of that period and the illusions it fostered – already shattered since the war in Iraq in 2003 – came to end from circa 2012 onwards.

There were undoubtedly missed opportunities to embed the Russian Federation in a wider European order that might have realized Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision of a ‘common European home’ outlined at a speech in 1989 before the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. ⁸ We cannot assess here when and why this did not happen or who was to blame beyond noting that the circumstances of the period following the break-up of the USSR did not favour a long-term plan to integrate the post-Soviet Russian state into the EU, which, at this point, was less certain of its direction as a multi-nation union. Russian membership of NATO was never a serious prospect for political powers used to seeing each other as necessary enemies. Russian elites in this period were more interested in their self-enrichment than in security. Earlier, Gorbachev’s vision had little support in what was still the USSR and by allowing the other socialist republics within the USSR to opt for independence, perestroika contributed to its demise rather than continuation. Russia’s exit from Afghanistan in 1989 was an additional catalyst for the fall of the USSR – and ominous sign for the present regime. The parting of the ways probably goes back to the first elections in Ukraine in 1991 when, with a turnout of 84 per cent, more than 90 per cent voted for independence from what at this time had become the Russian Federation (Plokhy, 2021, p. 321). But the autocratic direction in Russia had already taken place with the invasion of Chechnya in 2002 and in 2008 Georgia. From 2011 the Kremlin became increasingly repressive of internal dissent and civil society as well as undermining western democracies through collaboration with the US radical right, trolls, cyberwar and systematic misinformation (Giles, 2022; Khomyakov, 2023 in this issue; Snyder, 2018).

It is clear that the dye was finally cast in November 2013 culminating in February 2014 with the Maidan Revolution in Kyiv when the Ukrainian population rose in popular rebellion against the pro-Kremlin government of President Viktor Yanukovych over his refusal to sign the Association Treaty with the EU. The collapse of his government and his flight to Moscow marked the point at which Ukraine broke its historical association with Russia. The Russian Federation did not accept Ukraine’s embrace of the EU and invaded Crimea and the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine in what was the first stage in its attempt to bring about regime change in Kyiv. The so-called Minsk agreement at most froze the conflict and for 8 years it was business as usual with the Kremlin when it came to oil and gas supplies, and that despite the shooting down by Russian separatists of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur in July 2014, with the likely approval of the Kremlin. ⁹ The Russian Federation was faced with a closely linked country that was about to go in an entirely different direction. A democratic and pluralist Ukraine – despite all its problems with corruption and a weak state – was going to be fundamentally in opposition to Russia and its autocratic state. According to Paul D’Anieri, this set the terms for a deep conflict that cannot be reduced to external conditions, that is, NATO’s expansion, the activities not to be underestimated of US neoconservatives in Kyiv, or the Russian desire to recover Soviet space. This conflict is due to Ukraine embarking on the dual path of democratization and Europeanization at a time when the Russian Federation began moving in the opposite direction. Ukraine’s conflict with Russia and the West’s conflict with Russia have become tightly bound together (D’Anieri, 2019, p. 137). The strong belief that Ukraine is subservient to Russia, created the conditions for a clash that could not be easily peacefully resolved once the parting of the ways occurred. Once the path of autocracy set in in Russia, the Kremlin will not settle with a democratic Ukraine since it would undermine the power structure in Russia. This is all undoubtedly complicated by the fact that Russian nation has no clear territorial limits and has an unclear relationship with the Russian state.

It would be tempting but wrong to call this a ‘clash of civilizations’; wrong due to the closely linked lineages of the two countries and also because the clash occurred much latter, with the formation of Ukrainian nationhood and a different route to modernity than the imperial Russian one that was perpetuated by the USSR. Samuel Huntington’s notorious clash of civilizations thesis wrongly drew the clash in a line running right through Ukraine. The conflict that the war reveals is a deep historical fissure that goes back to the break-up of the USSR which led to the unfolding of, not just different, but incompatible models of modernity. As Johan Arnason (2020) has argued, there are undoubtedly civilizational currents present in these formations of modernity. One has only to consider the example of Aleksandr Dugin, the belief of the Russian Orthodox Church of the superiority of Russian culture to western civilization, and similar claims by proponents of radical Eurasianist philosophy. Pavlo Smytsnyuk in his contribution to this issue discusses the growing tie between religion and militarism in Russia. ¹⁰ But civilizational differences do not necessarily translate into civilizational conflicts: Conflicts within civilizations have generally been greater, as the history of Europe attests. Despite the cultural and even civilizational difference of Russia, it is also part of the wider European civilization, which I have referred to as an inter-civilizational constellation: It is not singular but plural and entangled (Delanty, 2018). The turbulent history of Russia itself in the twentieth history is also a testimony to the fact that no outcome was inevitable, neither the rise of Stalin nor the rapid demise of the USSR. More plausible than deep lying historical forces or primordial civilizational impulses – which lead to temptations of cultural essentialism, as Maxim Khomyakov in his contribution also warns against – are the range of cultural and political orientations that have merged in Russia in recent decades, the topic of Bryan Turner’s contribution. In whatever way the situation should be viewed, it seems clear that path dependency has set in and progressive forces within Russia have been silenced by a repressive state. This does not mean that the current situation was predetermined by long-run historical forces or is the result of irreversible deep structural forces or a civilizational essence. The intervention of agents – as illustrated by the figures of Lenin, Gorbachev and Putin – in the context of shifting interpretations of the historical moment is, in the final analysis, what shapes the contingencies of the present and creates new logics.

According to two Russian dissident critics, Artemy Magun and Greg Yuden, there is another underlying logic of the ‘special military operation’, and it is not just Russian ultranationalism nor the faux security arguments of Russian Federation and so on that accounts for it, but the outcome of the capitalist logic to extend control over territory. Such control is key, and always has been, to capitalist accumulation. ¹¹ The vast territory and wealth of Ukraine offers enormous opportunities for Russian venture capitalists to enrich themselves. This is also a powerful force behind the nationalist rhetoric and the pseudo-historiography in Kremlin propaganda.

The second and partially aborted invasion of February 2022 changed everything with the result that a new iron curtain has now fallen, or is about to. Finland, fearing mass migration as a weapon, is in the process of constructing a new wall along its 1300 km Russian border, and Norway is giving increased attention to its almost 300 km border. There is now a de facto wall across Ukraine’s more than 1000 km border with the Russian Federation, with only its final position yet to be determined. The significance of these developments cannot be overestimated, since they reveal a deep fissure between the world’s largest country and Europe over the place of Ukraine, itself the largest European country. This is first and foremost a European war whether we like it or not. The United States/NATO is inevitably involved by virtue of being Europe’s military defender, but the United States is not affected in the same way as is Europe since it is not under direct threat from the Russian Federation. The EU has no effective military capacity; defence was never envisaged as a part of the European project since the major sources of war emanated from within Europe, not outside. Now that those internal sources of war have been domesticated, the realization is dawning that there are also external foes. In view of what is widely believed to be the aim of President Putin to restore Russia as a great power, it is clear other countries once ruled by Russia have a reason to be concerned, probably not now but in the not too distant future. However, it does remain an open question whether Russia’s militarism has its sights set on European countries that were former USSR dominions. There are already signs that Moldova will be annexed via the pro-Russian separatist enclave of Transnistria. The major threat to world security is now neither terrorist organizations nor Islamic states, but the Russian Federation, which has made plain it is prepared to play a long game to achieve its aims, which will undoubtedly change as circumstances change and other opportunities arise. The Russo-Ukrainian War is clearly not then a regional war but a European one with global implications for the balance of power. The spectre of nuclear war adds to the wider danger of the war for Europe and Asia. It cannot also be so easily characterized as only a northern hemisphere war in view of the global significance of Ukraine as a producer of food and a major exporter of grain to African countries.

The signs are currently pointing in the direction of a growing drift towards a post-western world order with the liberal democracies of the West, on the one side, and on the other an augmented consolidation of authoritarian states. The loss of Ukrainian subservience to the Russian Federation has pushed the latter closer to China. The increased authoritarianism in India and Turkey are further signs of a shift in global geopolitics towards a wider Asian authoritarianism. For these reasons, the war in Ukraine is not just a regional conflict, even if it is primarily a European war. Europe, dependent for military protection on NATO, is forced to serve US interests and is also hostage to Turkey’s leverage over NATO. In this post-western world in which much of the world is taking up a position on Ukraine, a hard realism has become the norm. Where does that leave cosmopolitics? Widespread support of Ukraine ¹² in Europe is perhaps an expression of cosmopolitan solidarity, but in view of the reality of war and the urgency of military measures cosmopolitan values are not easily separated from security considerations. The war has further highlighted the politically unsustainable dependency of many European countries, principally Germany and Italy, on oil and gas from the Russian Federation. Such types of fossil fuel are among the chief foundations of dictatorships throughout the world. The early termination of the dependency and the failure of Russia’s strategy ¹³ is possibly one positive outcome of the war in that it has hastened transition to non-carbon fuels in Europe along with cooperation on medium-term energy solutions.

Normative issues raised by the Russo-Ukrainian War

If it can be agreed that the Russo-Ukrainian War is a very significant war at least for Europe, if not for much of the world, what kind of normative moral and political questions does it raise? It is clear that there are different positions on the question of military support as well as other kinds of support for Ukraine. This special issue is principally concerned with the philosophical case for military support and is organized around a series of responses to a substantial article by Hans-Herbert Kögler, a social and moral philosopher with an interest in critical hermeneutical analysis. Contributions by a range of scholars seek to understand the singularity of the war and its implications for our time. The first question is why Ukraine to begin with – Why is Ukraine important and what are the arguments for Ukraine to be provided with military support to defend itself from the attack from the Russian Federation? These arguments are primarily political, but they also have a moral foundation, as Kögler sets out in great detail, in that they pertain to the application of universal principles such as justice, autonomy and truth.

In the foregoing, I made the case that at least from the perspective of European societies/the EU, the Russian invasion and subsequent war, which effectively goes back to 2014 while having its origins in the break-up of the USSR and the divergent paths of Ukraine and Russia, is a hugely significant moment in the post-war history of Europe. Arguably it is a turning point, though the decisive turn was surely made with the Iraq war, which created the conditions for one country to invade another with impunity and laid the ground for increased turbulence in world politics. President Putin certainly had rational grounds for thinking he could invade Ukraine with impunity, in view of the weak response to the 2014 invasion. The Iraq war can be seen as a ‘critical juncture’ that served as a catalyst for major shifts in global power and national security (Fawcett, 2023). This is not to say that it gave a clear signal for the Russian Federation to invade, but it certainly created the conditions that made such an invasion more possible. So, the turning point was already reached and in a sense the current situation leaves little room for a turn, but for now at least to provide support for Ukraine.

The Russo-Ukrainian War marks another major global crisis in the post-Cold War era towards increased militarism in the context of a situation characterized by the absence of a balance of power. The centrality of Ukraine – due to its size and geopolitical location and importance as a supplier of food for some of the poorest countries in the world – is perhaps in the first instance a question of security, which in this case is not a minor matter were the Russian Federation to conquer Ukraine as effortlessly as it had presumably intended. However, the issues go beyond security and raise important normative considerations, both moral and political. Yet, it does not follow automatically that European countries individually or collectively should arm Ukraine and nor should they do so in perpetuity. Kögler is also not making such a case. It is not self-evident that a population under attack must be armed, even when there is a moral case to do so. Several countries (Ireland, Switzerland and Austria) have strong traditions of neutrality, even if others, Finland and Sweden, are reappraising their neutrality. ¹⁴ At least certain conditions must be present, such as international recognition that a sovereign state has been attacked and that its population requests assistance. These conditions are now fulfilled. Other conditions must also be fulfilled, which are analysed in the article by Hans-Herbert Kögler, such as capacity and effectiveness and which are always mediated by applying normative considerations contextually. Admittedly, there is a thin line between assistance and intervention, whereby assistance becomes a proxy war. But there are degrees of assistance. The position spelt out by Kögler is not the equivalent of the hawkish arguments of two former discredited British prime ministers (Johnson and Truss) to provide Ukraine with whatever it needs to push the armies of the Russian Federation back to where they were in 2014. Any action that imperils the survival of the current Kremlin regime could be dangerous for the world and especially for those countries with borders to the Russian Federation. As the USSR was in its final throes in 1990/1991, both Reagan and Thatcher argued for its survival. This was partly a case of better the enemy you know, but it was also grounded in fears of its nuclear arsenal falling into dangerous hands, a spectre that is still present in the event of a chaotic collapse of the Putin regime.

Arguments against the arming of Ukraine have been voiced and are particularly strong by left leaning critics in Europe and beyond for whom the war presents a quandary: to support Ukraine is to support US foreign policy. ¹⁵ Many choose to preserve their principles and remain silent on Ukraine. However, there are genuine concerns with the world becoming increasingly polarized around the question of Ukraine, which is the concern of Jan Nederveen Pieterse in his contribution to this issue. These concerns need to be taken seriously by all those who support Ukraine since there is a wider game playing out, the rules of which are being set by the United States and it is unclear where it will end. There is the danger of a situation developing whereby Ukraine will need to be permanently provided with arms to defend itself, a case of ‘if you want peace prepare for war’. However, there is also a lot shallow criticism of NATO and the United States; it is for example ignored that the United States at the time when the invasion happened in February 2022 was little interested in yet another war (even if there was not insignificant US presence in Ukraine since 2013 for training the Ukrainian armed forces) and that they pulled out of Afghanistan while Iraq is increasingly viewed as a disaster. Whether or not a proxy war is being fought between the United States and Russia – which appears to be also how President Putin sees the situation now that he lost the battle for Ukraine – is somewhat more complicated than is often seen.

There are two positions here (letting aside the position of the pacifist, which as Kögler says ends up supporting the aggressor). There is the argument that Ukraine is a pretext for pro-NATO expansion, in effect the extension of the global reach of the United States, which is allegedly using Ukraine as a means to strengthen its position as the world’s superpower in the same way it led the invasion of Iraq. Support for Ukraine thus inevitably, it is often claimed, leads to tension with China, which consequently is pushed to support the Russian Federation, resulting in the world becoming a more dangerous place – at least until it is reorganized around a new balance of power. Undoubtedly the real enemy for many critics of US foreign policy is NATO. This position, while valid in itself, ultimately does not answer the question whether Ukraine should be assisted in its struggle against invasion or even to take account of the consequences of an unchecked westward expansion of the Russian Federation. Without US military support, Ukraine would have been reduced to much the same status as Belarus, a subservient client state and would have experienced the terror that would have come with occupation. In her contribution to this issue, Yulia Yurchenko has dissected these arguments of ‘whataboutism’. As a trenchant critic of Blair’s war, John Kampfner has said, Iraq was a terrible war that should not have happened, but the fact that it did happen does not mean that that there should not be intervention in other cases. ¹⁶ Regardless of where one stands in relation to NATO and US interests, there is the unavoidable problem of taking a stance on an act of violence, such as that inflicted and perpetuated by the Russian Federation on Ukraine. If Ukraine were not supported militarily, what would the alternative be? As is clear from Yurchenko’s contribution to this issue, many left inclined critics of US foreign policy, such as Noam Chomsky, have no adequate answer.

A second and related position is why support Ukraine and not offer similar support to other oppressed peoples. Is it not just cynical or is it because the Ukrainians are White Christian Europeans? There are no shortage of wars and disastrous military interventions, including those perpetuated by the United States, in particular, and also by the United Kingdom – Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq. While this is a valid critical position in some respects, the difficulty we have with ‘whataboutist’ arguments is that the Ukrainian situation is very different from struggles going in other parts of the world in that a state is in a belligerent position and has called for help. This is different from the long history of disastrous western intervention in, for example, the middle east and in the many conflicts (i.e. the ‘new wars’) going on in the Islamic world where intervention would require regime change, as in Syria, or elsewhere, for example Burma. In any case, the issue of support for Ukraine is surely a separate matter from other possible interventions that can be made and where the specific cases would need to be evaluated. The large influx of refugees into the EU was temporary, with most returning a few months later. Support for one cause cannot be deemed inadmissible if one does not support all other possible causes, as Kögler also argues. The cynicism of double standards is not a virtue for sure, but one of the standards may be justifiable. The example of intervention in Kosovo is perhaps by its nature a more comparable case of an intervention by NATO that was broadly welcomed (except by Russia) and successful (in contrast to the disaster of Anglo-American intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan). In short, it must be possible to adopt a critical and normative position on the Russo-Ukrainian War without taking up a position that might generally endorse the worst features of US foreign policy from Vietnam to Iraq. The inescapable conclusion remains: both the Anglo-American led war in Iraq and the Russian war against Ukraine are examples of illegal wars and should be condemned.

As Ukraine is a European country under consideration for EU membership, it is not unreasonable for other European peoples to feel themselves under attack. This does not necessarily translate into a plan for action, since moral outrage does not necessarily led to a clear course of political, let alone military, action. Portugal and Ireland are not in the same situation as Finland, Lithuania and Poland. Hungary is pro-Russia. Kögler also does not make this claim, since the implications of a moral argument, while normatively orienting, do not determine political action, which is in need of further contextual assessment, as Peter Wagner (2023) points out in his contribution. Siniša Malešević in his contribution has made a similar point. In this situation, every country will have different responses, which will change as circumstances change. Germany’s initial reluctance to send its prized Leopard 2 tanks was understandable in view of the fact that the last time German tanks were in Ukraine was in 1941. In towns in Britain, the Ukrainian blue and yellow national flag can often be seen flying alongside the Union Jack. For Britain in many ways the war fits into the national memory of 1940 which it perpetuates: The Ukrainians are the British defending themselves against a monstrous enemy. So, moral positions also have a basis in cultural imaginaries as well as in political opportunism. But the question of collective responsibility still arises. Jan Zielonka in his contribution to this issue is clear that the EU has a collective responsibility to act against the Russian Federation for reasons both of principle and self-interest. Kögler also suggests this especially with regard to Germany. But how to do this without being overdependent on the United States? This is a major long-term challenge for Europe, whose interests overlap to a considerable degree with the United States, but inevitably also diverge.

The contrary position that Ukraine should not be armed or be continued to be armed can take the more moderate argument for negotiation. Who is not opposed to negotiation? This has recently been put forward by Jürgen Habermas (2023) in an essay published in February 2022 ‘A Plea for Negotiation’ in which he argues that the time has come for a ceasefire in order for negotiation to take place. While recognising the difficulty of negotiation with President Putin, he makes a strong case for negotiation to stop the armed resistance that is leading to massive fatalities. This is a position that leaves many questions unanswered. The desirability for peace does not easily translate into a clear political process that would lead to peace, unless the Russian Federation withdraws its armies. If it did so, the war would be over. What is the aim of negotiation – Is it concessions to the Russian Federation on what territories it may retain before it withdraws its arms? It is not self-evident that a ceasefire without a withdrawal would led to meaningful negotiations other than Ukrainian concessions to the Russian Federation. Who is to start the negotiations and how would peace be guaranteed? Habermas does not explain other than making a plea for negotiation, a plea that sounds like appeasement if not a demand for Ukraine to surrender the occupied territories. And should the abuse of human rights and other war crimes be overlooked as part of the deal?

It is often said that all wars end in negotiation, but in fact many do not (neither the Spanish Civil War nor World War II ended with negotiation but with unconditional surrender) and many also remain frozen or go on a very long time since there is no winner and no loser. ¹⁷ However, many of those wars that do eventually end, arguably do end with negotiation, as did Japan with the United States in 1945 after its surrender or the Anglo-Irish War of Independence in 1921 when a point was reached at which neither side could achieve their intractable objectives. But the key point here is that negotiation begins after the end of hostilities. The first World War ended on 11 November 1918 when the German Reich requested an armistice, which was accepted by the allied armies who had realized that outright military defeat was not feasible. The terms of German surrender were then negotiated, but the armistice had to occur first and one side, the weaker one, had to make the request. Negotiation can prevent a war from starting; it comes into play with the necessity to deal with post-war settlement, including surrender or withdrawal, reparations and, as in this case, the costs of re-building Ukrainian cities; but it cannot plausibly be a way to end hostilities. The problem with the current situation is that there is as yet no end, since both sides currently have a capacity for endurance, and with uncertain outcomes. At least those who make an unqualified call for negotiation should feel compelled to explain what they mean and where they stand in relation to appeasement. In this regard, Michael Mann’s position in this issue has the virtue of clarity, when he says ‘both freezing and compromise are preferable to full scale war’. The problem, however, is to reach that stage and ensure a lasting freeze, as in the examples of Korea and Kashmir where the frozen war is undoubtedly better than open war. As Ronald Suny and Anthony King make clear in their contributions to this issue, despite the hurdles to a negotiated end to the war, the dynamics and military practicalities of the war will eventually lead in that direction. This is also what Hass and Kupchan (2023) argue.

Military experts are generally agreed that for negotiation to occur, at least one side must be in a situation of not being able to continue. Furthermore, as a sovereign state that is under attack, it is presumably for Ukraine to decide when that point has been reached. Unlike in the example of intervention in Kosovo, the western supporters are not directly in control and cannot dictate the terms of what in effect would be surrender or an opportunity to allow the invading army to reposition. In an effort to add weight to a weak and controversial argument, Habermas claims that the ‘western alliance’ kept the Russian Federation in the dark about what it would do in the event of an invasion of Ukraine and therefore bear co-responsibility for the war, since if they had made clear how they would react, President Putin might not have ordered the invasion. The argument is disappointing coming from one of the most influential philosophers and needs to be rebutted. The ‘western alliance’ only formed after the invasion, which was not expected, and is hardly an alliance given the diversity of national positions. Germany’s first response was to send a derisory 5000 helmets to Ukraine. There was no united position to announce. Until circa June 2022, the major supplier of military equipment to Ukraine was the Russian Federation – in the form of abandoned tanks and other weapons captured by the Ukrainian armed forces. ¹⁸

The Russian perspective

Let us consider President Putin’s arguments that justify the ‘special military operation’. It is notable that the Just War Theory – which asserts war is not necessarily the worst option in certain circumstances – is not invoked by the Kremlin in their defence of the war. By any account, it does not pass most basic application of the Jus ad bellum, as Michael Walzer (2022) has argued. Three arguments are variously given by President Putin for the invasion of Ukraine, none of which have a basis in moral reasoning, and can be considered as exhibits of unreason nurtured by resentment and anger.

One argument, often reflected in the western discourse as well, is that the Russian Federation has a ‘right’ to a buffer-zone in eastern Europe as part of its zone of influence. This doctrine, that great powers have a right to a buffer-zone, which the United States has also voiced as part of its own military doctrine, is a product of the Cold War and its origin in the advance of the Red Army at the end of 1945. The countries it occupied in the course of its defeat of Nazi Germany remained as part of its zone of influence, some of which went back to imperial Russia. The fact that the Russian Federation possesses nuclear weapons is additionally invoked as ‘a right’ to such a zone of influence, since such states have some kind of special status. In practice, this has played out as a restriction on the expansion of NATO into the former Warsaw Pact countries and encroaching on the borders of the Russian Federation. NATO expansion has been complicated, as Michael Mann has pointed in his contribution, by alleged promises made after the collapse of the USSR that NATO would not expand into the former Warsaw Pact countries. But promises too were made to Ukraine. It should not be forgotten that in this period Ukraine still possessed a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons until, under pressure from the United States, ¹⁹ they were handed over to Russia in 1994 in what might now be regarded as a case of burning a strategic bridge since the Ukrainians were given assurances that the West would offer protection. ²⁰ This, in fact, is also an argument for US support for Ukraine now – at least if the fiction must be maintained that nuclear weapons protect the peace. As Yulia Yurchenko points out in her contribution, the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 also guaranteed Russian protection for Ukraine as a condition of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons – a promise that does not get much attention by the world press, which gives more weight to promises made to Russia. While Ukrainian membership of NATO has not been on the agenda, the parting of the ways from Russia in effect opened the festering wound of the now enlarged NATO and its rediscovered popularity. What are we to make of this position?

The first is that no legal agreements were made that precluded for perpetuity the former socialist countries from joining. ²¹ The only written agreement concerned East Germany (D’Anieri, 2019, p. 60). This has also been confirmed by Timothy Garton Ash (2023, p. 161). Whatever promises were given, were the promises of politicians and with the passing of time their binding power over the present is questionable. It cannot plausibly be argued that sovereign nations may not determine their own foreign and security policy on the basis of unclear historical promises. As Mikhail Shishkin (2023, p. 130), a Russian dissident writer, has put it in his incisive critical reflections on Russia, it was less a case of NATO pushing eastwards than of the eastern nations pushing westwards away from the Kremlin. Nonetheless, it is clear that NATO too readily allowed the former Warsaw Pact countries to join at a time when there were no security risks (for the simple reason the Russian Federation was no longer a great power). Had this not happened, the war might have been avoided (Watkins, 2022). In any case, despite its origins in 1949 as a military alliance and an instrument of US foreign policy, it has arguably become increasingly more an instrument of defence. It is also evident that President Putin’s aim is not to bring Ukraine back to a position of neutrality but to incorporate it into the Russian Federation through fealty and occupation (Allison, 2022, p. 1854). Maxim Khomyakov in this issue makes a compelling case that the Putin regime is a fundamentally amoral one.

Perhaps the most commonly heard argument is that Ukraine is not a ‘real country’. The notion of Ukraine as not a real country is premised on the view that it is an integral part of Russian civilization. Consequently its destiny is with the Russian Federation as the protector of that civilization. This reasoning has absolutely no legitimacy and must be refuted. Ukraine is a sovereign state along with other UN members. The fact that it shares a long cultural heritage with Russia does not make it subservient to Russia any more than it should be subservient to Poland, with which its western regions shared a long history. Like many countries, if not all, its history is a history of encounters, cross-fertilization and entanglement. No nation is pristine, unique and singular. Ukrainian nationhood has a long history, as outlined by Serhii Plokhy (2021) in his authoritative history of Ukraine, and as with many other nations it crystalized after the Napoleonic Wars when it built upon the older Hetmanate and the former Cossack state. Much of this debate has a lot to do with received traditions of historiography on the medieval origins of Russian civilization in Kyiv, a city founded by Vikings in 879 and who also gave the name ‘Rus’ to the early state. Both Ukrainians and Russians claim to be the heirs of the ‘Kyivan Rus’. To settle this question is like to trying to decide whether the French or the Germans are the true heirs of the Franks. It is however clear that the foundational myth of modern Russia that the origin of its nation was in Kyiv is a contested history that competes with a counter Ukrainian narrative of its own heritage and the trauma of having been one of the main battlegrounds – along with the Baltic States, Poland, Belarus and western Russia – of World War II when it was caught between Hitler and Stalin (see Snyder, 2011).

The received view of history, which is nothing more than a hegemonic narrative, is also present in the trope of ‘de-Nazification’, the topic of Ivor Chipkin’s contribution to this issue. The notion of ‘Nazis in Kyiv’ is one of the most ridiculous arguments given for Russian military intervention, but it has resonances in Russian history when during the ‘Great Patriotic War’, as it is known in Russia, Ukrainian nationalists joined forces with the Germans in 1941 to resist forcible incorporation into the USSR. The memory of this episode is obviously nothing more than a trope for the accusation of Ukrainian disloyalty to Russia and has undergone re-signification to refer to values associated with European democracies. ‘De-Nazification’ thus effectively means forcible de-Europeanization. It is possibly true that Ukrainian society has not fully come to terms with Ukrainian participation in the murder of Jews and its native fascism, and as Siniša Malešević points out slogans and symbolism associated with the far right are often found in Ukrainian resistance to Russia. However, when it comes to fascism today, it is difficult to compete with what the Russian Federation has to offer.

If these distorted arguments have no basis in reason or facts, what about the argument that to arm Ukraine is to risk nuclear war through escalation? This is clearly the most serious aspect of the war. Until now there is no indication that the Russian Federation will authorize the use of nuclear weapons, since to do so will almost certainly lead to its upheaval and collapse. In view of Russian dependency on China and the latter’s injunction that nuclear weapons must not be used, the probability is that so long as the President Putin’s regime is not directly threatened nuclear weapons will not be used. ²² The likelihood is that Ukraine will not succeed in pushing the Russian army entirely out of the circa 17 per cent of its territory that it occupies (at the time of writing in March 2023) – it is very unlikely that they will regain Crimea – and consequently the Russian Federation will not have grounds to claim it faces an existential situation. In any case, as Mary Kaldor argues in this issue, to refuse to support Ukraine for fear of nuclear war being unleashed by the Russian Federation is to succumb to nuclear blackmail and thereby provide an incentive for other authoritarian states to acquire nuclear weapons.

Nonetheless, the prospect of nuclear war at least as a possible outcome of the war in itself reveals the dire nature of the current situation. If the avoidance of nuclear war is all that can be hoped for, where does that leave us? Whatever the outcome, Ukraine will have to live with its increasingly unstable and unpredictable neighbour due to the insurmountable fact of geography. The prospects too for the left in post-war Ukraine are not likely to be served well by the current leadership, that for now enjoys well deserved popularity and support. Russia has never been a liberal democracy and it is unlikely to become one in the near future, as the conditions are sadly not present. The Russian Federation appears to be locked into a divergent path that sees democracy, the autonomy of civil society and human rights as European, as Orysya Bila says in her contribution to this issue. It is fed by resentment and anger that has undoubtedly increased as a consequence of the Kremlin’s miscalculation of a speedy victory over Ukraine, an error that is probably attributable to imperial overreach, as Ronald Suny suggests in his contribution. As it becomes increasingly isolationist and revanchist, replying on support from a handful of pariah states, such as North Korea, Syria and Belarus, it also loses influence over the former Soviet central Asian republics, leading to a more unstable and unpredictable situation. Total war may yet come, according to one chilling prognosis (Soldatov & Borogan, 2023); but the primary goal of any regime is its continuation, which in this case is probably achieved by freezing the conflict and increasing internal repression.

Conclusion

The shadow of war will remain for a long time and peace, if possible, will not take the form of what Immanuel Kant called in 1775, ‘perpetual peace’, namely a kind of peace that is not dependent on treaties but requires a fundamental transformation in political community. This will have to begin in Russia and until then it will mean that Ukraine will have to be given long-term military protection since whatever settlement with the Russian Federation is finally reached it cannot be relied upon to be upheld and the spectre of more war will always be present and the crisis of instability of the present will deepen. If NATO is that guarantor, which is unlikely, and the EU does not come up with its own security order or devise some kind of viable security pact for Ukraine, the problems of the current situation will persist until, to cite Ronald Suny, a ‘New Russia’ emerges. As Mikhail Shishkin (2023) has argued, it should be the mission of all Russian writers and intellectuals to show the world that there is another Russia. But in the pessimistic assessments of Orysya Bila, Maxim Khomyakov and Pavlo Smytsnyuk in their contributions to this issue, this is not likely to come for some time as Russia is locked into an autocratic, amoral and isolationist regime that will make impossible a peaceful relation with Ukraine. If Russia cannot make peace with Ukraine, how can there be a peaceful relationship between Russia and Europe? We hope that this collection contributes to debate on this urgent issue.

This special issue features a lead article by Hans-Herbert Kögler ‘Democracy or Dictatorship? The Moral Call to Defend Ukraine’. This is followed by articles by Mary Kaldor, Maxim Khomyakov, Anthony King, Siniša Malešević and Peter Wagner and shorter commentaries by Orysya Bila, Hauke Brunkhorst, Ivor Chipkin, Michael Mann, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Pavlo Smytsnyuk, Ronald Suny, Bryan S. Turner, Yuliya Yurchenko and Jan Zielonka. It concludes with a Reply by Hans-Herbert Kögler. All papers were completed in March/April 2023.