By GILBERTO LOPES*

As in 1938, the armies of Europe are again pointing towards Moscow, to the point of celebrating the rearmament of Germany, forgetting the consequences of German rearmament for the world in the last century.

Defeating Russia or the High Price of Losing Ukraine

“What’s at stake in the Ukraine conflict?” asked Stephen J. Blank, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, an institution based in Philadelphia, whose objectives are to strengthen the national security and foreign policy of the United States. Stephen Blank presents himself as a recognized expert on Russia and the former Soviet Union, author of dozens of articles and books, professor for 24 years (1989-2013) at the US Army War College, that is, the US armed forces.

Russia’s ambition, says Blank, is not just to redraw its borders with Ukraine, but also in the Balkans and Eastern Europe: Belarus, Poland, Romania, Moldova and the Baltic states. “All are at risk. Not only if Ukraine is defeated, but also if it fails to expel Russia from Crimea and Donbass.”

And he adds: “given the growing number of reports that Putin is preparing for a general war with Europe, any political-military change in the situation on the ground will be welcome.” What is at stake, in his view, is the opportunity for Washington and Europe “to defeat Russia and carry out the greatest strategic transformation in a generation.”

Stephen Blank’s article was published on December 13 last year. Donald Trump had already been elected, but had not yet assumed the presidency of the United States. The idea that Russia is a threat to NATO countries is shared by other academics and political leaders in Europe, the European Union and NATO.

Frederick W. Kagan, Kateryna Stepanenko, Mitchell Belcher, Noel Mikkelsen and Thomas Bergeron, researchers at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) – another Washington-based institution – speculates on “The High Price of Losing Ukraine” (The High Price of Losing Ukraine) in an article also published in December of last year.

Such a move, they claim, “would place the battered but triumphant Russian army on NATO’s frontier from the Black Sea to the Arctic Ocean.” Russia could then advance westward and “establish military bases on the borders of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania.” Some 3.000 km of borders! Almost three times longer than the front line of the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Claude Malhuret, French doctor, lawyer and senator from the right-wing group The Independents - Republic and territories (LIRT), told the Senate on Tuesday, March 4, that “the defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic countries, Georgia and Moldova are already on the list.” Putin’s goal is to return to Yalta, he assured, referring to the conference in which the leaders of Russia, the United States and England negotiated, in February 1945, the European political order after the Second World War.

But Claude Malhuret himself states that “contrary to Kremlin propaganda, Russia is doing badly. In three years, the supposed second largest army in the world has only managed to extract crumbs from a country three times less populous. Interest rates of 25%, the collapse of currency and gold reserves, the demographic collapse,” in his opinion, show that Russia “is on the brink of the abyss.” The same Russia that European academics and politicians believe is capable of invading Europe.

NATO's expansion

In Europe, these ideas are repeated ad nauseam. It is not just about Ukraine, but about the weakening of Europe, its destruction, said Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute of International Affairs in Rome. These are all speculative reflections, without any factual basis. It would be a military mobilization that would clearly exceed the capacity of the Russian army, if Vladimir Putin's repeated statements that he does not intend to advance into European territory were not enough.

If we look at the facts and take a cold-blooded look at Russia's capabilities, we see that there is no serious threat to Germany, according to American political scientist John Mearsheimer, in an interview with the German publication Der Spiegel, on March 7. When we think about Putin, we have to ask ourselves two questions, says John Mearsheimer. One is what his intentions are. The other is what his capabilities are. “In terms of his intentions, we have no evidence that he is an imperialist who wants to conquer all of Ukraine and create a Greater Russia, much less additional territories in Eastern Europe.”

“Didn’t your troops attack Kiev, Bucha and Irpin in 2022? Aren’t you still bombing targets all over Ukraine, including Lviv, less than 60 km from the Polish border? Isn’t that a threat?” asks the journalist. “There is no doubt about that,” replies John Mearsheimer. “But the cause of these wars was NATO expansion, not Vladimir Putin’s alleged imperialism.”

Munich and Yalta?

We have already mentioned the Yalta Conference in 1945, in Crimea, a territory that Russia annexed after the 2014 coup in Ukraine, in which Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin discussed, without the presence of the Frenchman Charles de Gaulle, how to reorganize the world after the Second World War. Russian troops were already just over 60 km from Berlin.

But Yalta was not the only reference from this period, taken up again in the debate on the situation in Ukraine. ABC, a Spanish newspaper that supported Francoism at the time, questioned whether history would repeat itself. It was talking about the Munich Pact of 1938, when the prime ministers of England and France, Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier, negotiated with Hitler the handover of the Sudetenland, then a territory of Czechoslovakia. It was September 30, 1938, and both countries dreamed that Hitler would leave them alone, that the war would then be against the Soviet Union.

For Soviet diplomacy, this was the intention. Stalin considered the agreement a betrayal of the Western democracies, which considered that the aim of the agreements was to isolate the Soviet Union in order to launch German troops towards Moscow. We already know that England and France were unable to prevent war, but the main objective of the German troops remained Moscow. European media outlets, academics and politicians have seized on this fact to suggest that the talks between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have similar objectives to those they attribute to the Munich agreements of 1938. Newspapers such as the ABC (and many others) accuse Donald Trump of trying to appease Vladimir Putin’s expansionist ambitions. But they make no reference to the purpose of these agreements, which is to facilitate Moscow’s conquest.

The enthusiasm for weapons

Thus, the rearmament plan proposed on March 6 by the president of the European Commission, the German conservative Ursula von der Leyen, in which she plans to invest more than 800 billion dollars, seems closer to the objectives of the Munich Pact of 1938. It is this meeting between the European Union and Volodymyr Zelensky, aimed at Moscow – more than the talks between the United States and Russia – that is identified with the other, that of Munich, in 1938, when the British and French were negotiating with the Germans.

Andrea Rizzi, journalist at El País, wrote from Munich, two days before the meeting called by Macron: the conference “showed the majority conviction among leaders to make a rapid leap in military capabilities, both to support Ukraine and to have the strength to dissuade Vladimir Putin from further adventures”. “The race for rearmament is part of the new European approach at a particularly convulsive moment”, said the correspondent of the El País in Brussels when commenting on the announcement, with enthusiasm for the new arms policy that extends to almost all the major European press, including the French Libération, the English The Guardian or the German one DW.

Vladimir Putin's "ambitions to reconstitute the Russian empire or its communist equivalent at all costs are well known," said Serge July, founder of the French daily Libération. On Wednesday, March 5, Emmanuel Macron gave a “solemn” speech, stating that “Ukraine had become a global conflict.” “Russia has become a threat to France and Europe,” he said, offering the nuclear umbrella of France, the only nuclear power in the European Union, to other European countries.

Days earlier, in an interview with French regional newspapers, he had said that “Russia poses an existential threat to Europe”. “Don’t think that the unthinkable cannot happen, including the worst,” he added. Emmanuel Macron spoke of a nuclear war against Russia!

As Céline Marangé, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Research at the École Militaire at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, put it, “in Russia, the war marks the culmination of a political project that offers as its future horizon a return to the Soviet era.” “The ultimate goal would be a dominant and feared Russia that has regained its status as a great power and erased the humiliation of its defeat in the Cold War, pushing back the borders of NATO and destroying the European Union.”

Strange times

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov noted the renewed European temptation to conquer Moscow. Reacting to Emmanuel Macron’s speech, Lavrov said the French president had delivered “an extremely aggressive anti-Russian speech, calling Russia ‘a threat to France and Europe’”. “I have said this before, but never in such an intense and irreconcilable way, which sounded like a Russophobic program of action.”

Emmanuel Macron wants to convince the French public that we are an existential threat to France, Sergei Lavrov said. But in fact, “Russia has never threatened France. On the contrary, it helped defend its independence and sovereignty in two world wars,” recalling de Gaulle’s concept of an indivisible European security, from the Atlantic to the Urals.

As John Mearsheimer pointed out in his interview with Der Spiegel, if we are interested in facts, in logic, if we coldly calculate Russia's capabilities, “we see that there is no serious threat from Russia to Germany.” Nor to Europe! Despite the enthusiasm of its media for rearmament.

As in 1938, the armies of Europe are once again aiming for Moscow! “What strange times we live in, with Poland celebrating the rearmament of Germany!” said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, another great enthusiast of military spending and the siege of Moscow, according to the correspondent of the El País. Strange times. A Europe (and a Poland) that forgets the consequences of German rearmament for the world in the last century.

*Gilberto Lopes is a journalist, PhD in Society and Cultural Studies from the Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR). Author, among other books, of Political crisis of the modern world (uruk).

Translation: Fernando Lima das Neves.

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