Abhijit Bhattacharyya | Ukraine fights to survive as Europe battles fatigue

Just a week later, September 4, Mr Kuleba was no longer the foreign minister (being replaced by Andrii Sybiha). President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the strongman of Kyiv, reportedly asked him to resign, in the biggest such political development since Russia’s invasion 31 months ago. Mr Kuleba seems to have ruffled Western feathers with his plain and blunt talk about the “war-weary psyche” of the traditional movers and shakers of mainland Europe. This belated acknowledgement of the bitter truth is now out in the open. The European heartland cannot afford to have any escalation of Moscow-Kyiv conflict, which might then move from east to west, reversing the forces of history.

Mr Kuleba exposed the hollowness of intermittent optics of the warriors in Brussels revealing how to fight a war without fighting on the ground. Europe’s history of hundreds of years of endless conflicts are too fresh to be forgotten and too dangerous a prospect to be repeated in an intra-Slav Russia-Ukraine war spilling over into Europe’s heartland. The West wants the war to be fought anywhere but on the soil of central Europe.

The 31-month conflict has already created enough chaos and fears of a near-recession, especially in Germany, the indisputable financial fulcrum and economic powerhouse in the 27-nation EU and 32-nation-Nato. Today, the very economics where the West is superior to the rest of the world is at the crosshairs of conflict between two Slav nations. Germany no longer gets cheap gas and power from Russia. The Nordstream under-sea gas pipeline is allegedly ripped apart by the West and its cohorts, severely damaging Germany’s economy. Multinational companies like Intel and Volkswagen are planning to withdraw billions of dollars, while VW may shut its factories in Germany, with thousands of jobs gone. Helping Ukraine appears to have come at a very high cost for the Germans.

To make matters worse for Ukraine, the United States and Britain are at odds on allowing Kyiv to strike deep inside Russian targets. This division within is too conspicuous to be missed and too scary to be ignored, as it may provoke Russia to act in a state of ultimate desperation to press the button leading to Armageddon. Europe, along with Moscow, is bound to be destroyed beyond recognition. MAD (mutually assured destruction) might become a sad reality.

Politically too, the European Union faces mutual bickering, suspicion and hostility on assistance to Ukraine against Russia. Hungary has been accused by EU’s chief diplomat Joseph Borrell of disloyalty as Budapest cannot do without Russia. The deputy PM of Serbia, also a EU member, openly and emphatically embraced Russia in Vladivostok. Turkey is the first Nato member to apply for membership of Brics, which is seen as the West’s congenital international adversary. And Germany, despite being one of the largest contributors to Ukraine’s coffers, is inherently opposed to provoking Russia beyond a point. Berlin’s memory of its Second World War destruction (with seven million people killed) simply can’t be understood by any other Western power. France too is making the right political noise, but is shrewd enough to avoid going near the war zone. Britain, at a “safer distance”, can afford to resort to war cries and supply hardware, but it too can’t join in a physical conflict due to the UK’s acute military manpower shortage. In the rest of Europe, except in Poland, there is a severe shortage of manpower to fight any conventional war as none of the EU members can afford to incur the loss of over 50,000 soldiers. That era is long gone. Today’s prosperous citizens of most Western nations are not prepared to die for “someone else’s war”.

Over 600,000 Russians and 300,000 Ukrainians have reportedly been killed in the ongoing conflict. Can the West afford even a fraction of such casualty figures? No Western country today has any populous colonies any longer in Asia or Africa, which could provide cannon fodder to fight the West’s wars as in earlier centuries. So, that option is ruled out for both Nato and the EU.

That all is not well in the Western camp can be seen from Russia’s counter-diplomacy too. Despite the best efforts by the Nato-EU bloc as well as the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague with its arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin, the countries outside of the Western bloc are in no mood to play ball with Brussels and Washington. A clear non-white, non-Western arc of nations from North Korea to Turkey through Mongolia, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, India and Iran appear as a physical shield of the Russian border, with the Middle Eastern Muslim countries, and most of Africa and Latin America supporting or sympathizing with the forces that are facing the might of the West.

However, all is not lost for the Western bloc yet, primarily because of the strength and global acceptability of the American dollar as the currency of international trade and transactions. Hence, as the supply of weapons to a belligerent (Ukraine) to counter the other (Russia) does not produce the desired results, there comes into play the “sanctions” to choke the finances of the perceived adversary, today’s Russia, for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Arguably the longest war of a major non-Western power after the Second World War, the unprecedented economic and diplomatic chaos and disorder are already visible. Given the failure of the West to force a decisive result and the corresponding Russian unease to clinch the issue in face of the endless supply of Western military hardware on the battle front, there is every possibility of a bitter fight to the finish and growing distress and disaster across Europe and beyond.

The Ukraine war now appears to be a war between the West and the non-Western bloc. As the EU and Nato arm and finance Ukraine for their expansion, Russia is drawing some support from powerful non-Western nations like China. Nato’s secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg made things obvious when he called on Beijing to “stop supporting Russia’s Ukraine war”. Was that a cry of despair or a sign of desperation? Time will tell. Just as the West continues on its path, Russia too will carry on.