2.28.22
Just last week, many European countries were still so somnolent about the threat Russia posed to Ukraine that Germany’s spy chief was caught unawares in Kyiv when the Kremlin invasion started. He had to be extracted in a special operation. But over just a handful of days, Europe has been shocked out of a post-Cold War era — and state of mind — in which it left many of the democratic world’s most burning security problems to the United States.The continent has in some ways leapfrogged the United States, which — though many policymakers credit the Biden administration for helping to coordinate — wasn’t prepared for the speed of the European change. And it has been dizzying for some of the continent’s Russia hawks, especially those in Eastern Europe who campaigned for tougher measures against the Kremlin for years but were ignored by bigger countries including Germany, Italy and France. That’s how it felt to Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics, who sat down in his office in the Latvian capital of Riga late Sunday to take part in a video conference with fellow European Union foreign ministers. On the call they agreed to another round of sanctions that days prior would have been unimaginable. They included banning Russian state media in the E.U., harsh sanctions on Russian banks, and even using E.U. funds to pay for countries’ shipments of weaponry to Ukraine — a step so outside the ordinary operations of the 27-nation bloc that some policymakers didn’t realize it was an option.
The countries taking action against Russia stretch around the world. Japan announced on Monday that it, like other countries, will impose sanctions on Russia’s central bank and on senior officials in Belarus. Australia meanwhile said it would sanction Russian President Vladimir Putin and other senior Russian leaders and would supply weaponry to Ukraine. But no region other than Europe has overturned its foreign policy orthodoxies in a heartbeat. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared he would vastly increase his country’s defense spending and start shipping arms to Ukraine. A top leader of the German Green party — which grew out of an anti-nuclear power movement decades ago — declared an openness to keeping his country’s nuclear plants operating if it helped reduce reliance on Russian energy. “It’s the end of an era,” said former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who was once dismissed by a Finnish leader as having “post-Soviet stress” for his hawkish approach to Russia. “What you grew up in, the last 30 years, is over,” he said he told a group of college students late last week. “We are somewhere else.” “The scales are falling from people’s eyes,” said Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia and NATO deputy secretary general. “There are no more illusions or hopes about cooperating with Russia.”
