The Impossible Has Become Possible

SARAJEVO, (Patria) - History has accelerated; the impossible has become possible. Changes that no one could have imagined two weeks ago are now happening with incredible speed. As it turns out, nations are not mere players in the board game of Risk. They do not have, as some academics have long imagined, eternal interests or permanent geopolitical orientations, fixed motivations or predictable goals. Nor do human beings always react as they should, writes Anne Applebaum, an expert on international relations and authoritarian systems, for The Atlantic.

Last week, no one analyzing the impending war in Ukraine imagined that the personal courage of the Ukrainian president and his emotional calls for sovereignty and democracy could disrupt the plans of foreign ministers, bank directors, business executives, and thousands of ordinary people. Few imagined that the sinister television appearances and brutal orders of the Russian president could change the international perception of Russia in just a few days.

Putin's paranoid rampage has frightened even those who praised his "common sense" until a few days ago

And yet, all of this has happened. Volodymyr Zelenskyy's courage has touched people, even stubborn oil company executives, even boring diplomats accustomed to stereotypical statements. Vladimir Putin's paranoid rampage, at the same time, has frightened even people who praised his "common sense" just a few days ago.

He is not really someone you can do business with, as many in Berlin, Paris, London, and Washington wrongly believed; he is a cold-blooded dictator who is happy to kill hundreds of thousands of his neighbors and impoverish his nation if that is what it takes to stay in power. Whatever the outcome of the war – and many scenarios are still conceivable – we are already living in a world with fewer illusions.

Merkel spoke of democratic values, but in practice, she was more concerned with the economy

Look at Germany, a nation that has spent almost 80 years defining its national self-interest in purely economic terms. If the government of some distant region where Germans buy and sell goods was repressive, Germans were never to blame for it.

If military aggression reshaped Europe's external borders, that too was peripheral to Germany. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel, although she spoke a lot about liberal and democratic values, in practice was far more concerned with creating good conditions for German business, wherever that business was conducted.

That attitude, which prioritizes the economy, infected her nation. Shortly after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, Applebaum participated in a panel discussion in Germany on "the greatest threats to Europe." Given the timeliness, she spoke about Russia and assumed that the other speakers would do the same.

But she was wrong. One of the other panelists called her a warmonger. Another loudly claimed that the biggest threat was a proposed trade agreement that would allow Americans to sell chicken washed in chlorine to German supermarkets.

Scholz threw all that out the window in half an hour

Applebaum still remembers that detail today because she was unaware of the great debate about chlorinated chicken that had gripped Germany at the time and had to inquire about it further. But she has had similar experiences many times since.

She appeared on a German television program two weeks ago, along with three German politicians who, even then, argued that despite thousands of soldiers and armored vehicles on Ukraine's borders, the only conceivable solution was dialogue.

On Saturday, in a 30-minute speech, the current German Chancellor Olaf Scholz threw all that out the window. He said that Germany needs planes that fly, ships that sail, and soldiers who are optimally equipped for their missions, and that the German army needs to reflect Germany's size and importance.

Germans have finally learned the lesson of history...

The German government has made a complete U-turn and will even send weapons to Ukraine: 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger missiles. Even more incredibly, this 180-degree turn has the support of an astonishing 78 percent of the German public, who now say they support much higher military spending and are happy to pay for it.

This is a fundamental change in Germany's self-definition, in its understanding of its past. Germans have finally realized that the lesson of their history is not that Germany must forever remain pacifist. The lesson is that Germany must defend democracy and fight against the modern version of fascism in Europe when it appears.

...and they are not alone in this

But Germans are not the only ones who have changed. Across Europe, people are realizing that they live on a continent where war, in their time, in their countries, is no longer impossible. Slogans about European "unity" and "solidarity" are now beginning to have some meaning, along with "common foreign policy," a phrase that has largely been fiction in the European Union until now.

In theory, the EU has a single spokesperson for foreign policy, but in practice, European leaders have delegated that job to people who know little about Russia and whose fallback position when Russia misbehaves has always been to express "deep concern."

The previous High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini, was more interested in the European Union's relations with Cuba than with Kyiv. The current holder of that office, Josep Borrell, came to a meeting with his Russian counterpart last year and seemed surprised to be treated with contempt.

But now everything is suddenly different. "Deep concern" has been replaced by real action. Less than a week after the invasion began, the European Union not only announced harsh sanctions against Russian banks, companies, and individuals – sanctions that will also affect Europeans – but also offered $500 million in military aid to Ukraine.

Individual European countries, from France to Finland, are also sending weapons and imposing their own sanctions. The French say they are compiling a list of assets of Russian oligarchs, including luxury cars and yachts, to confiscate them.

Ukraine will never be the same again

Europeans have also abruptly abandoned some of their reservations about Ukraine's membership in their institutions. The European Parliament on Monday not only asked Zelenskyy to speak via video link but also gave him a standing ovation. MEPs from across the continent voted to accept his application for Ukraine's membership in the EU.

EU accession is a long process and will not happen immediately, even if Ukraine emerges from this conflict unscathed. But the idea has been launched. It is now part of the continent's collective imagination. Because it is a distant place, poorly understood, it is now part of what people think of when they say Europe.

Ukraine itself will never be the same again. Things are happening so fast, and moods and emotions are changing every hour and every day, that it is difficult to determine what will happen next or to predict how people will feel about it.

But what is certain is that the events of this week have changed not only the world's perception of Ukraine but also Ukrainians' perception of themselves. Long before this war, the conversations in Washington and Berlin were always focused on Putin and Joe Biden, Sergey Lavrov and Antony Blinken, NATO and Russia.

Experience in fighting Russian propaganda is finally paying off

These were conversations that appealed to academics and experts: big topics, big countries. In this conversation, Ukraine, as political scientist John Mearsheimer put it in 2014, was nothing more than "a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia." But Ukrainians have now placed themselves at the center of the story, and they know it.

As a result, thousands of people are making decisions they could not have imagined two weeks ago. Ukrainian sociologists, baristas, rappers, and bakers are joining the territorial defense. Locals are standing in front of Russian tanks, shouting "occupiers" and "murderers" at Russian soldiers who are firing into the air.

Construction workers with lucrative contracts in Poland are leaving their tools and taking trains home to join the resistance. Decades of experience fighting Russian propaganda are finally paying off, as Ukrainians are creating their own counter-narrative on social media.

Many Russians don't even realize what's happening in Russia?

They are posting videos telling Russian soldiers to go home to their mothers. They are interviewing captured teenage Russian conscripts, and they are putting video clips online. Even if this ends badly, even if there is more bloodshed, every Ukrainian who has lived through this moment will always remember what it felt like to resist, and that too will be important in the coming decades.

And what about Russia? Is Russia doomed to be forever a revanchist state, a backward-looking former empire that constantly wants to regain its old role? Must this vast, complicated, paradoxical nation always be ruled poorly and cruelly by elites who want to steal its wealth or oppress its people? Will Russian rulers always dream of conquest rather than prosperity?

Currently, many Russians do not even realize what is happening in Ukraine. State television has not yet acknowledged that the Russian army has attacked Kyiv with missiles, bombed a Holocaust memorial, or destroyed parts of the centers of Kharkiv and Mariupol. Instead, official propagandists are telling Russians that a police operation is being carried out in the easternmost provinces of Ukraine.

The public is not receiving information about casualties, war damage, or costs. The extent of the sanctions has not been disclosed. The images seen around the world, for example, the bombing of the television tower in Kyiv, cannot be seen in the Russian evening news.

Information leaks even into strictly controlled Russia

Yet, there is a strong and consistent flow of alternative information. Yuri Dud, a famous blogger with five million followers on Instagram, has posted a photo of a bombed building in Ukraine. The YouTube channel of Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned Russian dissident leader, is equally clear to his 6.4 million subscribers.

His associates condemn the war, as well as the extension of his prison sentence, and both are part of the same story of internal and external repression. Millions of Russians know, because they have friends and relatives in Ukraine, that Putin has attacked a neighbor they do not consider their enemy. Some have called those friends, crying over the phone, to apologize.

What might happen in Russia if this story spreads and the details become clearer? What if Russians eventually are able to see the same harrowing images that we are seeing? What if the price of this senseless violence becomes tangible to them as well? The unpopularity of this war will grow, and as it grows, so will another Russia – a different Russia that has always been there.

The Russians who flooded the streets in 1991 to support the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russians who protested against rigged elections in 2011, the Russians who protested in large numbers across the country against the arrest of Navalny in 2021, the Russians, rich and poor, urban and rural, who do not want their country to be an empire of evil, and perhaps their numbers will grow enough to be significant. Perhaps one day they will change the nature of their state as well.