Ukraine War-the future does not start with Ultimats

Ukraine is not a homogeneous state – it is a geopolitical resonance room. For decades, their fate has been shaped from the inside not only from the inside, but increasingly from the outside. Awarded between western and eastern interests, it is symbol and reminders at the same time: for the failure of understanding, for displacement of historical experiences and for political practice, peace and more military logic. It is time to ask the question: How can we as a society – as a science, as a politics, as a European public – give youth in Europe a future that is not determined by war? What does it mean today to think of a pan -European peace regulations – an order that does not exclude Russia but integrates?

For me, these questions had a biographical, rather random origin. A World War II -related grave search to a friend’s father led me there. Afterwards I got to know Ukraine since 2005 through numerous teaching posts at universities in Odessa, LVIV and Charkiv. There, in exchange with young lawyers, the realization grew that fundamental legal policy has to create more than a law. It was a prevailing mission statement for a legal state to be developed to develop its own way in independence and cooperation on all sides, which must demonstrate unusual limits of power to every policy. A publication entitled “Your own way of Ukraine” was created in the joint discourse of three Ukrainian universities (Odessa, Lviv, Kharkiw) and the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Such a freedom of effort was increasingly deformed in the area of ​​tension in geopolitical power interests and is now fully plowed in a geopolitical, warlike access.

The political fainting of Ukraine has always rooted in a structural overwhelming: a huge country, twice as large as Germany, with over 40 million people. Ukraine has long been shaped by an inner tension – between a western, European -based country part in the west and a eastern, culturally and linguistically different. A territorial balance and economic stabilization through a contract solution would have been possible for both parties to the conflict, even shortly before the Russian invasion of international law. The conveyed explicitly on February 14, 2022 in the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” Thomas Greminger, the general secretary and today’s Swiss ambassador for security and cooperation (OSCE) until 2020. But the West rejected that. Trapped between the zone of the West and the security interests of Russia became a striving for a battle of survival in the slipstream of the block logic – a descent that turns out to be a civilizational decay because it not only leads to immeasurable victims on all sides, but also discourages entire generations.

This is where the responsibility begins. If European integration is more to be more than an economic project, it must also remain a peace project – inside and outside. Peace, which Europe is so popular, must not become an exclusive resource, from which others remain excluded. A European Ordinance of Peace is only credible if it also includes Russia. The attempt to isolate Russia through NATO expansion and economic spheres of influence caused the opposite: distrust, armament, war.

The path to a common future does not begin with ultimats, but with conversations – with exchange at eye level. This was exactly the central topic in joint seminars with students from Russia and Ukraine, which were initiated in Berlin in 2017. Under the programmatic title “Leave the Future to the Future!”, 16 students of both countries met to discuss federal solutions, social justice and peaceful change together. What became noticeable in these encounters was a common need: In their essays, the students discussed pragmatic suggestions about federal and decentralized solutions of the conflict between the two countries, each supported by regional autonomy. So peace not as a political maneuver, but as an ideal for civilization.

It was an echo on the experience of Europe after 1945: Peace is not a gift, but tedious condition that requires care, patience and historical deep sense. This deep sense in particular is missing in the political debate today. Historical knowledge is replaced by moral short circuits. Anyone who calls Russia today is quickly suspected. But if you know history, you know: Otto von Bismarck was not a pacifist, but a realist. According to the so -called German unification wars, he recognized the geostrategic logic of Europe: “Never with Russia!” Was not an ideological slogan, but an expression of a sober peace policy that declined Germany twice – and went down twice dramatically.

It is this teaching that has to be used today. In a world of nuclear threats and global exhaustion, war can no longer be a means of politics. Only a policy of compensation, the recognition of mutual security interests, can survive. That does not mean to put in relaw into perspective. In the search for political stability, it does not mean to build moral self -certification, but rather not cement national narratives on structures of trust for economic and cultural cooperation – and in institutions that make common interests visible.

Preliminary print from the prologue of Peter -Alexis Albrecht, emeritus professor of criminal law and criminology at the University of Frankfurt am Main, to the book “The Ukraine in the destructive access policy, 240 p.