Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at Oxford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
For 77 years since 1945, people have compared this or that European figure to Adolf Hitler. For 77 years, this has been indefensible hyperbole. Now, when applied to Vladimir Putin, this seems for the first time an appropriate comparison – not yet to the Hitler of the Holocaust, but to the Hitler of 1939, invading Poland.
Every hour we see, as live video clips on our mobile phones, scenes from the Second World War. The rubble in bombarded cities. Killed and orphaned children. The treks of refugees. All the while Ukrainians tell us on the radio, in fluent English, how they face death to defend their homeland, freedom and Europe. Yes, Europe – they keep saying that word.
With its superb resistance, Ukraine has already transformed its image across the world. Its people have already done for most Europeans, who sit safely inside NATO, the EU or both, this great service: to wake us up, at last, to the dangerous world we’re in. The transformation of German policy in particular, and the resolute determination of Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Emmanuel Macron to build a Europe with all three dimensions of power – military as well as economic and cultural – this, too, we owe to the Ukrainians’ determination to resist Mr. Putin’s war of recolonization.
So this is what Ukraine has done for Europe. What will Europe do for Ukraine?
“Do prove that you are indeed Europeans.” Thus did Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky challenge EU leaders, in a passionate, unscripted video address to the European Parliament. The Parliament replied with a motion saying that EU institutions should “work toward” granting Ukraine the candidate status the Ukrainian president has asked for in all his wartime conversations with EU leaders, but “on the basis of merit.” European Council president Charles Michel responded that “we will analyze the request from Ukraine.”
The contrast between the language of these two Europes – the Europe of peacetime bureaucratic process and the Europe of wartime existential struggle – is acute. The only adequate response from Europe’s core political community to the besieged Ukrainian president’s explicit request is for EU leaders to say that Ukraine – fighting as it is to defend European values – is immediately accepted as a candidate for EU membership.
There are both short and long-term reasons for taking this extraordinary step in extraordinary times. First, it is something that European countries can actually do without going to war with Mr. Putin ourselves.
We should do everything we still can to help the Ukrainians in their fight. But unless there is a palace coup in the Kremlin or Mr. Putin feels compelled to change course, both of which seem unlikely, the hard truth probably is that neither side can win this war. The Ukrainians will fight as insurgents with guns and with countless acts of civil resistance – but they cannot militarily defeat the overwhelming brute force of Mr. Putin’s Russia.
Therefore, sooner or later, there will come that morally abhorrent but necessary moment when someone has to sit down with the representatives of a war criminal to negotiate peace. If Mr. Zelensky is prepared to concede his country’s neutral status, as he has already hinted, if only for a specified period, then he must have something of major historical importance to show his own people that their sacrifice has not been in vain. This could be it. Only the Ukrainians have the right to make this painful call – but the offer has to be there from European leaders. People often say that the EU was originally a peace project. Let it again contribute to peace.
The actual journey to joining the EU would take many years and face many obstacles. But the quite properly demanding accession process would give a framework in which Ukrainians could continue their peacetime work to build a strong, prosperous European democracy – and one to which the millions of Ukrainian refugees now fleeing westward would wish to return. Otherwise, Mr. Putin will erect a new Iron Curtain, and Ukraine will be behind it.
In the long term, this would also mean that the Kremlin eventually has to give up its delusions of rebuilding the Russian empire. Liberated from the burden of oppressing others, Russia can itself set out on the long journey toward being a major European nation state, having a special relationship with the EU and NATO, and not a satrapy of China.
Unless the EU makes this courageous move, the message from West European capitals to besieged Europeans in Ukraine is, in effect, “thank you for the way your heroic struggle is helping us create a more united, stronger Europe, but there’s no place in it for you.” In this moment of existential challenge, Europe can do better than that.
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