Ukraine War: Hajo Funke: How a country was plunged into disaster

This war is not a natural event. It arises because people have the power to lead it, others do not want to prevent it and others cannot prevent it,” writes Hajo Funke, looking back on the outbreak of the war in Ukraine over two years ago. The political scientist, who taught at the Otto Suhr Institute at the Free University of Berlin until 2010, warns with concern that there will be no victory for Ukraine without its almost complete devastation. An assessment that he shares with serious military officials in the USA, Germany and also in Ukraine. The logical consequence would therefore be: “If such a victory cannot be achieved, it is responsible for considering negotiations and exploring the chances for this.” Instead, however, Ukraine is being further armed by the West, supported with full eyes on its own doom. The game changer, “a word used inflated and irrelevant in talk shows by Carlo Masala or Marcus Keupp,” is said to be the constantly new and more modern weapons delivered to Kiev.

Of course, Funke castigates Putin’s brutal attack on Ukraine. But he also shows meticulously how this could have happened and refutes in detail the claim that this war was inevitable. It was avoidable. »The escalation could have been stopped. Even after the war began, there were missed opportunities.” But any offers from the Russian side and mediation efforts from third parties were not taken seriously.

Funke goes a long way to prove this, recalling the vision of the last CPSU general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, of a common European house, initially appreciated in the West, but not with honest intentions, but rather hypocritically. As happened just a few years later with NATO’s eastward expansion, which broke assurances made in the negotiations on German unity. The author quotes the US historian George Kennan, who described this as “the most serious mistake in American politics since the end of the Cold War”. “It is to be expected that this decision will strengthen nationalist, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in the Russian public, trigger a new Cold War in East-West relations and push Russian politics in a direction that does not correspond to our wishes at all.” , he wrote under the headline “A fateful error” in the New York Times on February 5, 1997. The US administrations subsequently showed no interest in a sensible, balancing, cooperative security policy towards Russia, states Funke. Russian security interests fell on deaf ears, especially with George W. Bush Jr. and his “God warrior mentality.” At the same time, all US governments did everything they could to hinder economic and political cooperation with Russia that was in line with German interests.

In 2001, there was still stormy enthusiasm for Putin in the German Bundestag, applause from all parliamentary groups for his outstretched hand speech, which was delivered in German, and the NATO-Russia Council, which was launched the following year, still gave rise to hope for a strategic partnership, there seemed to be one EU or NATO membership for Russia is possible, then 2008 should bring a fatal departure from all sensible approaches. Funke speaks of a “key year”. The decision in Bucharest to eventually admit Ukraine and Georgia into NATO snubbed Moscow. From then on, Putin moved away from a friendly attitude towards the West. His warning criticism at the Munich Security Conference in the same year was “arrogantly ignored.”

While Putin initially presented himself as a liberal president keen on cooperation, he gradually radicalized into an anti-Western nationalist. With his re-election as president in 2012 and the founding of the influential Izborsk Club, an ideological alliance of patriotic statesmen, authoritarian-nationalist aspirations in Russia received new impetus, says Funke, who briefly introduces some of the leading representatives in his book. At the beginning of his career at the top of power in Russia, Putin liked to quote Kant, especially from his work “On Eternal Peace”, today he is inspired by anti-democrats such as the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin, who glorified the Nazis and died in 1954, and the Slavophile Nicolai Danilewski and the Eurasian neo-fascist Alexander Dugin.

Now one could of course object here that a person’s political and ideological change is their own choice. But it cannot be denied that in this case the West promoted it. Since his first presidency, Putin has promoted cooperative security in lectures as well as concrete offers and initiatives. With the coup on February 20, 2014 against the then Ukrainian president, which was probably triggered by infiltration of Western secret services, as well as the subsequent clashes in Crimea and the discrimination against the predominantly Russian population in Luhansk and Donetsk through the ban on the Russian language, according to Funke, “an absolute “Provocation,” the fuse was lit on the powder keg. A genuine implementation of the two Minsk agreements to limit the conflicts in eastern Ukraine, among other things by offering the prospect of more autonomy, has not been adequately undertaken, even by the guarantor powers Germany and France.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyyi, elected in 2019, decided, with the support of a parliamentary majority, to seek NATO membership and concluded a military agreement with the USA on August 31, 2021, which, among other things, provided for the modernization of the weapons that have been increasingly supplied since 2017. Now they were heading towards war at a staccato pace, Funke notes. An agreement proposed by the Kremlin on December 17, 2021 was rejected. Funke quotes Theo Sommer, the long-time editor of “Zeit,” who made an urgent appeal at the time: “Communication is urgently needed in the Ukraine conflict. But the governments are relying on military action, the relationship between the USA and Russia is poisoned.

The West’s missed opportunities to resolve the conflict and avoid the terrible war also included the USA’s unilateral termination of the ABM and INF agreements, which are important in terms of security strategy. Funke attributes the rejection of initiatives to quickly end the war, such as those from Beijing, primarily to the neoconservative hardliners around US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, but also to German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock.

Hajo Funke doesn’t have any recipes for how to achieve a ceasefire and ultimately peace in Ukraine. However, he does point to a revival of the former German and European détente policy as an essential step towards this. “Negotiation is the only way to peace” is his message, which everyone wishes for, especially the politically and militarily responsible forces in both the West and the East.

Hajo Funke: Ukraine. Negotiation is the only way to peace. The Bookmaking, 110 p., br., 10 €.