What is Europe still waiting for? Ten years ago, when Russian troops occupied Crimea and launched an insurrection of criminals and separatists in eastern Ukraine, we could still afford to be “shocked” and “stunned.” Even on the eve of February 24, 2022, after months of deployment of hundreds of thousands of Russian troops, we still refused to believe that a full-scale territorial conflict against a European country would ensue.

For three years now, Europe has been watching almost daily on the news what is happening less than two hours’ flight from here: the relentless bombardment of cities, the flight of millions of people out of war zones and across borders, countless crimes perpetrated against the civilian population, missile strikes close to nuclear facilities – in short, the annihilation of the Ukrainian nation’s livelihood. The aim is to plunge Ukraine into cold and darkness and force it to surrender.

This is not happening somewhere we don’t know, but in the very heart of Europe. Kyiv, the millenary city of cathedrals and monasteries, has been hit. In Kharkiv, a metropolis of 1920s modernist skyscrapers, entire districts are in ruins. Even “little Vienna” (Lviv, the former Habsburg Lemberg) was not spared by Russian missiles. Odessa, whose promenade and Potemkin staircase we know from Sergei Eisenstein’s (1898-1948) film Battleship Potemkin (1927), is under attack from Iranian drones. How would Europeans react if bombs fell on Trieste, Italy, or Marseille?

Dangerous illusion

It is a dangerous illusion to assume that this is just a Russian-Ukrainian conflict. From the outset, Russia’s leaders have left no doubt, whether by their statements or their actions, as to their objectives: to regain control of Central and Eastern Europe and restore the Europe of Yalta, which Milan Kundera (1929-2023) once called the “kidnapped West,” in an article published in 1983 in the magazine Le Débat (Gallimard).

A foretaste of this is presented in the occupied territories of eastern Ukraine, with their prison camps and torture chambers. Europe, looking the other way, refuses to see that Putin is in fact waging a war against Europe and the West.

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