OPINION: Make no mistake: Putin wants more than Ukraine. His war is about the entire European system, which rests above all on the inviolability of borders, Joschka Fischer writes.
BERLIN — Russian President Vladimir Putin has made his choice. He has brought war to Ukraine. This is a watershed moment for Europe. For the first time since the Balkan wars of the 1990s, which were limited to the area of the disintegrating Yugoslavia, the continent is once again confronted with bombardments of cities and rolling tank divisions. But this time, it is a nuclear superpower that started the fighting.
Putin now claims that Ukraine is an inseparable part of Russia. Whatever the majority of Ukrainians think is irrelevant to him; Russia’s greatness and international standing are all that matter. Ukraine did so because it had received “guarantees” of its territorial integrity, as stated in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances of Dec. 5, 1994. That document was signed by the guarantor powers: the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Russia, alongside Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan .
Fleeing the Kremlin’s grip What Putin does not seem to realize is that Russia’s longstanding policy of dominating foreign peoples in its sphere of influence makes other countries focus on how to escape the Kremlin’s geopolitical prison at the first opportunity, by securing protection from NATO. The alliance’s eastward expansion after 1989 attests to this dynamic.
Just compare Russia’s economy to China’s. Both are authoritarian systems, yet Chinese per capita incomes have grown robustly while Russian standards of living have been declining.
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