Amid renewed hopes today that a diplomatic solution is within reach, this is one of the most astute observations about Europe’s multi-layered failure over Ukraine.
A very timely and pertinent question about the lack of any serious peace proposal from the EU by the fourth year of the war.
I would say it’s a combination of rational interests and the degradation of political leadership and expertise. The European centrist elites are rather cynically buying themselves time at the cost of Ukrainian lives and the destruction of Ukraine, aiming to rearm the EU and hoping for Russia’s weakening. But this strategy is rooted not only in the structural interests of transnational capital, but also their incapacity to provide leadership for an inclusive security structure, a lack of understanding of long-term global changes, an expertise crisis regarding post-Soviet countries, a blatant overestimation of Ukrainian resilience and underestimation of Russia’s resilience, and a failure to anticipate that the sociopolitical consequences of this strategy within the EU could make it not less, but even more unstable, fragmented, and vulnerable.