The Canary, the Historian, and the Ukrainian War
I have a friend who takes other people’s suffering as her own, and almost physically. When she visited Babyn Yar — the place where Kyiv’s Jews, thirty-three thousand men, women, and children, were shot in the fall of 1941 — she described being torn by excruciating pain. Her experience reminds me of Simone Weil, who died in London in 1943, a year after she left Nazi-occupied France, refusing to eat because of her compassion for prisoners of the Nazi camps. Like Weil, my colleague has mystical experiences. Her health is frail, and she has experienced clinical death. From that time on she has claimed she could see the future. I am a rational person, and normally the last to believe such claims, but there was one episode in August 2021, when we were drinking coffee on a summer terrace in our native city of Lviv, in western Ukraine, when she told me that this was “the last peaceful summer.” She predicted the date when Russia would launch its invasion, erring only by a day. After the war started, she moved to Krakow. I have since met her there, and she told me when and how this war would end. I keep her words to myself, because I do not wish to expose her to derision. I can only say that with the development of events at the front, and after Trump’s victory, her forecast looks very plausible.
My friend is a poet. In our part of the world, poets are believed to have a gift for prophecy. The greatest of them are even called national prophets. This is in contrast to us, the historians: we can barely deal with the past, so what could we possibly say about the future? Still, historians do have one advantage. They can look at daily events from a historical perspective and reveal long-term tendencies of the past that may be working both for the present and the future. In the 1960s, a group of historians and political scientists at the University of Michigan started a project entitled Correlates of War, or COW. Since then, they have compiled a rich dataset on military conflicts of the past two hundred years. The most significant finding of the project is a general constancy in warfare. There have only been twelve years during this period when a new war did not start — but there has never been a year with no war ongoing. These findings pose a challenge to the literature of “democratic peace,” and its projections of a declining trend in warfare.
Ironically, one of the most bellicose periods was the end of the Cold War, at precisely the time when Francis Fukuyama published his infamous essay on the end of history. Its last paragraph reads:
The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.
Would he have retracted his article if he had been familiar with the statistics of the COW project? In any case, for historians a “return of history” is not a surprise. History neither ended nor returned. It has been always with us, as have its darker themes of mass violence, wars, and genocides. The Russo-Ukrainian war is another proof of this historical tendency.
This war can be compared with many military conflicts of the past. As a war between a smaller democratic state and a large authoritarian neighbor, it can be compared to the Greco-Persian wars, in which a smaller and more free-spirited tribe of Greeks gained an empire. If we remove democracy from the comparison, then this war is similar to the Finnish-Soviet war of 1939–1940. If we add a colonial dimension, then it looks like the French-Algerian war, or any other war of decolonization.
When Putin started his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he was counting on a victorious Blitzkrieg — just as Hitler had expected of his Blitzkrieg against Poland in 1939, against France in 1940, and against the Soviet Union in 1941. The facts show that those who start a war tend to lose it. The rate of victory for initiators of inter-state hostilities has been on a constant decline, and now comprises thirty-three percent. The reason for this is that decisions to go to war are often emotional rather then rational, with no real goals and no real appreciation of the war’s ultimate costs.
After his Blitzkrieg plans for Ukraine failed, Putin resorted to a war of attrition. And here a comparison with the First World War — a classic case of this kind — comes to mind. In this type of war, the outcome depends not so much on what happens on the battlefield, but on who is able to bear the brunt of war longest. Such a war ends not in a military victory but in a collapse. The latter occurs, to borrow Hemingway’s famous remark about bankruptcy, gradually and then suddenly. Collapse can happen not only to one of the parties in the conflict but to all of them. World War I ended with the collapse of the Russian empire in 1917 and of the Austro-Hungarian and German empires in 1918. It may be said that the Russo-Ukrainian war is a competition between two countries for who will collapse first.
Ultimately, in a war of attrition, the outcome depends on resources. If Ukraine is left on its own, its prospects — no matter how bravely the Ukrainians fight — look bleak, even doomed: Russia has a three-to-four times advantage economically and demographically. But if Ukraine has access to the West’s resources, then Russia’s chances are slim. Russia’s GDP is slightly larger than that of Italy, and comprises only about ten percent of that of the European Union and nine percent of that of the United States. It is not surprising that both countries are looking for allies. Ukraine counts on the West; Russia counts on China, Iran, India, and most recently North Korea. This is not a world war, but a war that is distinctly global.
Comparisons can also be treacherous. In the summer of 2024, the Center for Applied History at Harvard’s Kennedy School prepared an analytical report on the possible outcomes of the Russo-Ukrainian war. The experts looked for the best possible solutions that could satisfy the national interests of all the belligerents and their primary patron states, i.e. Ukraine, Russia, the United States, and China. Their choice fell on the outcome of the Finnish-Soviet war. Although Finland lost a part of its territory and remained neutral during the Cold War, in the long run it aligned strongly with the West, joining the European Union in 1995 and NATO in 2023. Such a scenario offers a hope for Ukraine’s long-term democracy and self-determination under a similar outcome.
The authors of the Harvard report, however, ignored an important detail. I refer to Putin’s attitude toward Ukraine. It has the character of an obsession. More than once, he and his spin doctors have stated that Ukraine is a nation artificially created by the West in order to undermine Russia. For this reason, comparisons with the Soviet-Finnish war, or the two similar cases of the Korean War and the division of Germany after World War II, do not quite work. Even Stalin, in his wars with Finland, Germany, and Korea, did not aim to destroy their national identity. Not so with Putin. In this sense, he can be compared with Cato the Elder, who ended his every speech with the words “Carthage must be destroyed.” Or with the current Muslim leaders who set themselves the obsessive goal of destroying Israel.
In some ways this is an uprecedented war, and the longer it goes on, the less history has anything to say about it. Pavlo Kazarin, a Ukrainian journalist who volunteered for the war in its first days, wrote that he could not watch Hollywood war movies anymore: they did not reflect the realities of war as he experienced them.
The protagonists of Apocalypse Now were not attacked by guided bombs. The de-miner from The Hurt Locker doesn’t know what tank combat looks like. John Rambo’s position was never hit by a 152-caliber shell. . . . We are the only ones who have ever shot down hypersonic missiles. The only ones who have destroyed long-range radar detection aircraft. No such experience exists in any army in the world — including the US Army.
Before Russia’s full-scale aggression of 2022, there were futuristic speculations that wars would come to resemble scenes from the Terminator movies. Warfare, it was said, would undergo a transition from industrial war, with the clash of tanks, to war of the information age, when military equipment is controlled by computers via the Internet, with minimal involvement of manpower. The first phase of the Russo-Ukrainian war was nothing of the kind. It looked exactly like conventional modern warfare, with extended front lines, infantry, tanks, and planes. But soon drones brought a change. They now control large strips of territory on both sides of the front line, making close combat virtually impossible and snipers largely redundant. Drones helped Ukrainians to neutralize the Russian fleet in the Black Sea and to compensate for manpower shortages on the ground. The end of last year saw another breakthrough: in a location north of Kharkiv, Ukrainians conducted a ground attack using exclusively unmanned ground vehicles and drones for the first time.
The war may move to other zones that were previously unaffected. The First and Second World Wars brought warfare underwater and into the sky. Now the sky is no longer the limit. The British philosopher A. C. Grayling warns that as the new space race intensifies, conflict over resources on the moon is all but inevitable. The moon, the New Frontier, may become a new Wild West. And I have not mentioned AI, which is being frantically integrated into the militaries of many countries. It was used in the war in Gaza.
As the Russo-Ukrainian war drags on and acquires unprecedented features, it seems that history has less and less to say about it. Yet it is important to point out that many things are not new. We used to talk of the Soviet Union as the last empire and believed that with its demise the age of empires was finally over. Now the Russian Empire is attempting to return and reclaim its status as a superpower. The same can also be said about China, its ally. So we may indeed be facing a new age of empires. We also believed that “the short twentieth century,” 1914 to 1989, the era of war and revolution, is over. Ukraine may undermine this conclusion, too. Since the country’s independence in 1991, it has experienced two revolutions and two wars. You might say that Ukraine is stuck in the twentieth century.
Moreover, the Ukrainian case may not be so exceptional. Since the end of the Cold War, the world has experienced two great revolutionary waves — the “Color Revolutions” of the 2000s and the short-lived Arab Spring in the next decade — as well as the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Gaza. From this perspective, the period between 1991 and 2001 looks like a short respite between two major periods of wars and revolutions, just as the period between 1919 and 1939 was a respite between two major wars. The twentieth century is proving to not be all that short. In significant ways we are still living in it.
Two paradoxes characterize the current situation on the Russo-Ukrainian front lines. First, since the fall of 2023, the Russian army has overcome a positional stalemate and made a steady advance — but despite tremendous efforts and tremendous losses, it has made no strategic breakthrough. After three years of fighting, the front line is largely where it was at the beginning of the war, and no large Ukrainian city has been captured. Second, the war has entered a stage in which soldiers are becoming harder to send into a battle. An overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian population (88 percent in November 2024) believes in Ukrainian victory — but many if not most of them are not willing to go to the front. The same may be said about the Russians: they support Putin, but they want this war to stop.
For historians, these paradoxes are not really surprising. They may easily recognize a familiar pattern from the First World War, when after three years of fighting the initial patriotism faded away and military advances had little effect. During the next two years, the front line collapsed, as did the whole European geopolitical order. The latter had been established in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna after the defeat of Napoleon. With all its imperfections, the Viennese system set a historical record. For almost a hundred years, the European continent did not have a major war, and the nineteenth century went into the annals of European history as the longest peaceful century.
With the end of the Second World War, an opportunity arose to beat this record. Putin, with his aggression against Ukraine, destroyed it. In this war, another geopolitical order is at stake. That order emerged in postwar Europe. In the past, Europe was an exceedingly warlike continent: the two world wars originated there, and it was the Europeans who brought about major advances in military technology. Nowadays, it is hard even to imagine a war between England and France, France and Germany, or Germany and Poland — even though in the past these countries fought each other ferociously. After the Second World War, military conflicts were replaced with the politics of reconciliation. These improvements began with the Franco-German reconciliation of the 1950s and ultimately led to the creation of the European Union, which was defined as a “no war zone.” That was an unprecedented achievement. There had been nothing like it in the past.
Since the fall of Communism, there was a chance that this “no war zone” could be extended further east. Polish-Ukrainian relations were a test case. In the past, Poles and Ukrainians fought frequently, and in the twentieth century their conflicts over the disputed Polish-Ukrainian borderlands took the form of mutual ethnic cleansings. There were fears that, with the collapse of communism, the Polish-Ukrainian war would resume with a renewed force. In 1969, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz wrote to Jerzy Giedroyc, the editor of the Paris-based Polish émigré journal Kultura:
For several years now and especially recently, I have been obsessed with the thought of a coming catastrophe . . . Politically we are facing the growth of nationalisms of the Nazi type. It takes place in Russia, it also takes place in Ukraine and other republics, and it is the same in Poland . . . If that outburst occurs, it will be completely blind, with people slaughtering each other, and the problems of Lviv, the Treaty of Riga etc. will be revived, and this time we are prepared to ultimately perish under the heaviness of that cataclysm.
Fortunately, this did not come to pass. A solution to the conflict was proposed by Giedroyc. In the early 1950s he suggested that, for the good of Poland, Poles should agree that Lviv is a Ukrainian city. This proposal was so radical that a majority of Poles refused to accept it — for them, it was tantamount to treason. The situation changed when the anti-communist Solidarity came to power in Poland in 1989: Giedroyc’s doctrine served as the basis of its foreign policy. Since then, whoever comes to power in Warsaw or Kyiv — and regardless of any “ups and downs” in their relations — treat each other as allies.
The “Giedroyc doctrine,” as well as the entire system of postwar European reconciliation, was built on the premise that while there are no just historical borders, the existing borders are best left alone, lest interference with them provoke a domino effect. History should be bigger than applied politics. Hence the “Never Again” slogan of the postwar European system. Nowadays, with the annexation of Crimea and other Ukrainian territories, this humane and pragmatic system is in jeopardy.
In Putin’s mind, his war of attrition against Ukraine is just another episode in the millennial confrontation between Russia and the West. According to his worldview, the past dominates the present and there is no room for a future other than permanent war. After the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war, we witnessed how this precedent was used by Azerbaijan to reclaim Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia; and Xi is brooding about Taiwan; and Trump is running his mouth about annexing or buying or conquering Canada, Greenland, Gaza, and Panama.
Still, there is a basic difference between the language of Trump and the language of Putin. Trump talks about interests, however wildly, but Putin talks about values. On many occasions, Putin and his satraps have claimed that they stand for traditional values against a corrupted liberal West — that theirs is a holy war. In this rhetoric they sound similar to Muslim terrorists. No wonder they treat each other as allies.
And so this war is not about Ukraine alone. Nor is it even about the global order. It is at its heart a war of values. This gives it a completely different dimension. It is easier to reach a truce when it comes to interests, but it is much harder to strike a compromise when it comes to values. For values, people are ready to go at each other’s throats.
Values are like air: we cannot see them but they affect all our lives. This is one of the main findings of the World Values Survey, the largest academic social survey project, which has collected data from one hundred and twenty countries over the last hundred years. Societies with secular values that prize self-expression tend to be richer and democratic. Societies with traditional values and an overriding concern about survival tend to be poorer and autocratic. There are many differences between the two types, but the most distinctive difference concerns gender, particularly the status and rights of women.
When we talk about values and living standards, it is impossible to determine what is the cause and what is the effect — they are forever locked in a “chicken-and-egg” relationship. What matters, however, is that the choices that societies make are to a large extent determined by their past. There are three major historical factors: traditional religious denomination — Protestant or Catholic, Christian or Islamic, and so forth; an imperial legacy; and the presence or absence of communism in the past. All factors combined, as Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel have shown, Western countries have fared better.
With the fall of communism, Russia and Ukraine started from a similar position. They were somewhere between the West and the Rest. In the 2000s, however, their historical trajectories began to diverge. Ukraine tilted to the West and democracy, while Russia sank into isolationism and authoritarianism. In both countries, there emerged a large and educated middle class that stood for political freedom against predatory and corrupted elites, but the outcomes diverged. In Russia, the opposition was either suppressed or forced to emigrate; in Ukraine it came to power in the two Maidan revolutions. The last one, the Euromaidan of 2013–2014, was called the Revolution of Values or the Revolution of Dignity. Those were not empty words. The Ukrainian revolutionaries were risking their well-being, their health, and even their lives for what they saw as the European values of dignity and liberty.
As a former KGB officer, Putin does not believe in spontaneous mass protests. He managed to suppress them at home, but he failed in Ukraine, despite his persistent interference since 2004. To explain his failure, he came up with the myth that the two Ukrainian revolutions were the result of a Western conspiracy against him and Russia. Putin believes — or wants us to believe — that he is waging a war not with Ukraine, but with the West on Ukrainian territory, in the name of traditional family values against the permissive Western liberal order.
The values-based character of the war was evident from its first weeks. Back then, groups of Russian mercenaries were reported to have been in Kyiv with a mission to assassinate Volodomyr Zelensky and to destabilize the government. There was a debate among military experts regarding how this plan would affect the war if it succeeded. The consensus was: not very much. Ukrainian army commanders and city mayors acted independently and were not looking to Kyiv for guidance. These were the values of individual autonomy and self-expression in action.
The Russo-Ukrainian war may be considered a military conflict between a vertical establishment and a horizontally organized society. Among other things, this is reflected in the fact that Ukraine has demonstrated the cutting edge in military technology. Very often these innovations come from private IT companies and other non-state organizations. Owing to their ingenuity, Ukrainians have managed to hold back a stronger and more numerous enemy. It is not surprising that the Pentagon and NATO are watching the Ukrainian experience closely — they are attempting to learn how to conduct a new type of war from Ukranians.
But the enemy learns, too. Russians, using their advantage in resources, adopt and scale up many Ukrainian innovations. It takes months for this to happen, given the usual slowness of the administrative vertical. And the time lag is important: during those months the Ukrainians invent something new, and the race continues.
All these stories may arouse skepticism. If Ukrainians are so resourceful, then why do they retreat all the time? Historical studies may provide an answer here, too. They reveal that free societies tend to fight better, but their advantage diminishes as the war drags on. The greater the losses and the suffering, the more survival values come to the fore.
Values not only distinguish one society from the other; the dividing line also runs within every society. And since the army is a snapshot of the society, this division affects military forces, too. It has been said that there are actually not one but two Ukrainian armies, with two contesting military cultures. One army is trained according to NATO standards and is made up of units that are allowed to fight the way they want to fight. They are able to figure out the best way to use their people and resources and they have the authority, the duty, to improvise according to circumstances. The other one is very similar to the Russian or the old Soviet army, where commanders lack flexibility, strictly follow commands from above and demand that their subordinates follow them as well, without particular regard for rationality or changing conditions or consequences.
The first army is made up largely of volunteers, often the same people who stood on the Euromaidan. They were at the front from the very first days. Many of them have perished or been promoted to senior officers’ positions; some are burned out after three years on the battlefield and the latest escalations in fighting. In short, their role has decreased, and the second army, the rigid army, has come to the fore. In the end, the conflict looks like a large Soviet army fighting a small Soviet army — and the situation is often saved by an even smaller NATO-like army. This affects the general mood. As a recent survey on Ukrainian concerns about military service shows, initial enthusiasm is being tempered by the reality of a protracted war. Apart from the fear of death or disability, there is the fear of unprofessional commanders, the fear that military equipment would be inadequate or not arrive in a timely manner.
New realities have forced Ukrainians to redefine their understanding of victory. At the beginning of the war, they regarded victory as a return to the 1991 borders. Now many see it as the preservation of Ukraine as an independent state with international guarantees for its security. This would not be a complete victory. Still, it would be a strategic gain against the backdrop of Putin’s plan to erase Ukraine from the political map altogether.
To be sure, a large part of the responsibility for Ukrainian failures falls on the Ukrainian leadership, its inefficiency, its corruption, its chaos, and its populism, which does not allow unpopular but necessary decisions to be made. At the beginning of the war, the Ukrainian state enjoyed enormous social trust. Now there is a rift between state and society, and the rift is growing.
Yet the West also carries its share of the blame for the Ukrainian situation. It does not want Ukraine to lose, but neither does it want Ukraine to win. It fears the repercussions of a Russian defeat, just as in 1991 it feared the collapse of the Soviet Union. Experts say that if the Ukrainians had sufficient weapons and support from the West, they could have won the war as early as 2022. The same goes for the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2023 and the fact that Ukrainians were slowly losing ground in 2024. The Russian army was able to go on the offensive because the package of military aid to Ukraine was blocked in the U.S. Congress for seven months — from October 2023 to April 2024. According to American officials, by the end of 2024 only about half of the total dollar amount that the United States had promised from American stockpiles had been delivered, and only about thirty percent of the promised armored vehicles had arrived.
To better understand the importance of this factor, imagine what would happen to the young state of Israel if it were supplied with American aid at the same pace and level as Ukraine. One of the factors in the victory of the entente in the First World War and the Allies in the Second World War was American aid. This was recognized even by Stalin: he admitted that if the United States had not helped the Soviet Union, the latter would not have won its war against Hitler.
They say that old generals fight wars in the old ways. President Biden was formed as a politician during the years of the Cold War. He believed in the containment strategy that had been central to keeping the peace for nearly seventy years. This strategy was carried over and applied to the current Russian “hot” war — so as not to turn it into World War Three and not to provoke a nuclear attack by Russia. His support of Ukraine was genuine but it lacked alacrity. Yet what worked during the Cold War does not necessarily work in the conditions of a hot war. The strategy of “helping Ukraine for as long as it takes” does not work, because for Ukraine, given its smaller resources, “as long as it takes” can be, certainly by impatient American standards, too long. It is true that Russia is exhausting its resources, and its economic prospects beyond 2025 look bleak. But it would be naive to think that the collapse of Russia is imminent, whereas Ukraine most certainly may collapse. As the Ukrainian proverb says, the dew will burn your eyes before the sun rises. The West, in sum, must move to more decisive action. Otherwise the Western leaders are themselves condemning Ukraine to protracted agony. The signs are not auspicious.
It is not hard to imagine what would happen to Ukraine if Russia wins. Even before the Russian invasion, there was information about Russian “kill lists.” Their existence has been confirmed since the war started. The people on these lists included teachers of Ukrainian language, literature, and history; journalists, scientists, and writers; priests of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and other denominations that support Ukraine; and public and political figures, chiefs of regional authorities and self-government. What may appear to the West as an exaggerated fear is for Ukrainians a harsh wartime reality, reinforced by the memory of the Holodomor, the Stalinist repressions, Chernobyl, and, most recently, in 2022, the massacres in Bucha, Irpin, and Izium.
At demonstrations abroad in support of Ukraine, Ukrainians have adapted Golda Meir’s words — “If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.” — but they replaced “Arabs” with Russia and “Jews” and “Israel” with Ukraine. It is abundantly clear that many in the West do not care about the fate of the Ukrainians, just as before they did not care about the fate of the Syrians. But unlike the savagery in Syria and elsewhere, the war in Ukraine has a stronger impact on the West and its people.
For Putin’s war will not end with Ukraine. The degree of his contempt, if not outright hatred, for the West should not be underestimated. Oleksandr Lytvynenko, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine, predicted that “having failed to defeat Ukraine in three days in a large-scale war, the Kremlin has passed the point of no return in relations with the West,” and left for itself only the options to “triumphantly win or lose crushingly.” Putin’s has geostrategic plans for the next ten to fifteen years; their implementation is to be accompanied by conflicts of various scales and intensity, possibly with the use of nuclear weapons. (I take this analysis from “A Few Theses on Putin’s Policy: How The Kremlin Thinks and Wages The War,” Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine, November 11, 2023.)
Western intelligence confirms these assessments. The Kremlin could be in a position to attack a NATO member within the span of three to five years. The next most probable targets will be the Baltic States and Poland. This prognosis has been recently reiterated by the EU’s chief diplomat Kaja Kallas. She warned that “We are running out of time. The Ukrainians are fighting for their freedom and ours. They are buying us time.” And Valery Zaluzny, the former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, went so far as to say that with North Korean forces fighting with the Russians on the front line and Iranian and Chinese weapons flying into Ukraine, a Third World War has already begun.
To many skeptics in the West, the Ukrainians are crying wolf. But people who are under an existential threat must be believed over those who are not. People who are fighting for their lives generally do not lie. Ukrainians warned about Putin’s plans long before the war. He developed them back in 2008, right after the Georgian-Russian war. According to this plan, Ukraine was to be “punished” by a full-scale invasion if it continued to move out of Russia’s orbit. Most of the territory was to be either directly annexed by Russia or turned into a puppet state. The exception was the western part of the country, which historically is least Russified and Sovietized — it was to be divided between its “former owners,” Poland and Hungary. This plan leaked to the West and was published first in an Italian geopolitics journal, and then reprinted in one of the main Ukrainian newspapers. Putin spoke about this partition plan in 2008 during his meeting with then-Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and then- (and now-) Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski. He offered them Lviv.
Sikorski revealed this offer several years later, when he was out of office. His revelation created a scandal. In Poland, he was asked why he remained silent for so long, and in the West his words were taken as a provocation. Finally Sikorski had to disown his report. But it is worth noting that the British journalist and security writer Edward Lucas insisted that Sikorski was right and that the plan did exist, since he had himself heard of it at numerous off-the-record sessions at security conferences and think-tank meetings. The problem was that Western leaders did not grasp their significance. “Now the West is taking a belated class in practical geopolitics,” Lucas wrote in 2014. “It is an education paid for by hundreds of thousands of innocent Ukrainians, in blood and misery. But the full fee for the course will, I fear, be far greater.”
Those decade-old words might have been written yesterday. In the very first week of the current war, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz defined it as a “historic turning point.” Now, three years later, it looks like the turning of this point is proceeding according to the same formula as the Western aid to Ukraine — too little, too late. We are witnessing a situation that is reminiscent of the “springtime of nations” in 1848. Back then, the liberal revolutions that broke out in Europe ended in spectacular failure. As G. M. Trevelyan wrote, it was “the turning point at which modern history failed to turn.” We may face a similar scenario.
Ukraine is not crying wolf. It is, rather, like the canary in the mine. Outside of Ukraine, many ignore its warnings or are even annoyed by their persistence. Life would be much nicer if the canary would stop chirping. And so they look through a microscope at all of Ukraine’s faults, at its corruption and its past sins, to prove that it is not worth helping. In the eyes of some, Ukrainians are the main culprits behind the protracted hostilities: if Zelensky were only more accommodating, the war would have ended a long time ago! All together, they are ready to sacrifice Ukraine to Putin for their own mental peace.
They do not believe that what is happening in Ukraine today may happen to them tomorrow. They forget that attempts to appease aggressors do not work. Must one really remind Westerners of the Munich agreement of 1938? That surrender of Czechoslovakia to Hitler did not prevent the Second World War; it accelerated its beginning. This history lesson seems so banal that it feels embarrassing to bring it up. But as skeptics like to joke, humans do not make the same mistake twice, they usually make it three or more times.
We are living in an era of enormous historical importance in which our politicians usually do not think historically. Their horizons are generally limited to the projected duration of their own political careers. This is especially the case if they, like Donald Trump or Elon Musk, come from fields that are a far cry from a knowledge of history. In their cases, indeed, they evince a contempt for the past and prefer to believe that they are completely without precedent. So they may put the Russo-Ukrainian war on pause, as a discrete matter of policy, but they can hardly stop the looming war crisis. If history has any lessons, one of them should be this: if you see war coming and you are not sure if there is a serious possibility of preserving peace, you would be wise to bet on war as the most probable scenario, and be ready for it. As the Latin adage says, si vis pacem, para bellum — if you want peace, prepare for war. Those words should be translated into every known language.
The knowledge of history helps us to sort out what is new and what is old in the current Russo-Ukrainian war. This knowledge does not make us feel better. Still, it leaves room for cautious optimism. The revolution of 1848 was defeated, but seventy years later most of the revolutionaries’ demands had become political realities. It took the First World War to make the impossible possible. For war brings not only carnage, but also opportunities. To take constructive advantage of postwar opportunities, you must have a historical imagination.
It was seventy years after the revolution of 1848 when the first volume of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West appeared. Since then, the decline of the West has been predicted many times. And still the West is still vigorously with us. Over the last two centuries, it has survived several deep crises, including major wars. Some of those wars ended with solutions that provided an impetus for further social and political development. The Napoleonic Wars ended with the Congress of Vienna, which established the “long peace” of the nineteenth century. Without this peace, the quantum leap of the Industrial Revolution would have been impossible. The First World War brought the final collapse of the old regime, and the Second World War led to the emergence of a large “no war zone.”
None of these solutions lasted forever, and the time always came for a new crisis and a new solution. The war in Ukraine may be the crisis that the contemporary West needed. Whether the West will take advantage of this opportunity, whether it will recognize the moral and historical lessons of this awful war, is an open question. But Ukraine should be for the West not only a source of anxiety but also a source of hope. Ukrainians are interested in a strong and free West and are ready to work on its renewal. For them, this is not a whim. It is an ultimate need: finally to escape the shadow of Russia, which has a centuries-long historical record of mass repressions and wars. Like the West, Russia also proceeds from crisis to crisis. There is an essential difference, though. Unlike in the West, short-lived attempts to democratize Russia after her defeats in the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, and the Cold War failed, and ended with protracted periods of reaction by Stolypin, Stalin, and Putin.
In principle, the Russians, too, should be interested in overcoming their harsh past. But for various reasons they are not capable of doing it on their own. The memorable words spoken by German President Richard von Weizsäcker on the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II could be applied to Russia as well: “May 8, 1945 was not a day of defeat for Germany — it was a day of liberation.” The best thing that can happen to Russia is that it loses this war; if not right now, then in the foreseeable future. This will open up a chance for a new democratic Russia that no longer poses a threat to its own people or to neighboring peoples and will no longer constitute a threat to global stability. The “no war zone” could be extended further east of the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands of the West.
According to the custom of the genre, an essay such as this one should end with a ringing conclusion. I will not do this. The text ends but history does not. As the war drags on, it is too early to close the book. Suffice it to say that the canary is still singing.
