The fear of an energy and economic crisis is great in view of the throttled gas supplies from Russia. However, it must not lead to yielding to Russia’s President Putin. Appeasement to aggressors is usually the wrong approach, as historical examples show.
With the destruction of Ukraine’s infrastructure, Putin is also showing what is really important to him: the country is to be completely destroyed.
Despite a clear unity in the West and strong signals at the recent G-7 and NATO summits: In the light of Russia’s brutal war of annihilation against Ukraine and caught in the dilemma of massive energy dependence on Russia, some European governments are also pursuing a policy of appeasement, i.e. politics , not averse to placating an aggressor.
However, governments that wish to have “peace” at any price in order to avoid serious economic consequences become accomplices. Appeasement may work among appeasers, but not among those who harbor medieval fantasies of imperialism in the tradition of Peter the Great. In the case of Putin, it would only increase the aggressiveness.
“Natoization” of Europe
The lessons of history show that. They reveal striking parallels: the appeasement was made notorious by the British pre-war Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who believed in 1938 that the Munich Agreement would stop Hitler’s war and expansion plans.
The consequence of this appeasement was a largely destroyed Europe and the holocaust of over 6 million European Jews. 57 years later, Western appeasement in the Yugoslav war on European soil led to another catastrophe: These days, Srebrenica marks the 27th anniversary of a genocide in recent European history, when in mid-July 1995 over 8,500 Bosniaks – almost exclusively men and boys in Aged between 13 and 78 – systematically murdered by Serbian forces.
It was the sad climax of a bloody war that claimed the lives of around 100,000 people in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Much of this would have been prevented had the West supplied arms to the Bosnian defenders. Instead, the danger of an escalation was invoked together with the demand “No weapons in crisis areas”, which was to the advantage of the Serbian aggressors. They had upgraded after the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991/1992 and were able to draw on heavy equipment from the Yugoslav army, which was the third largest in Europe at the time.
On the other hand, young Bosnian fighters without protective helmets, tanks or artillery tried to prevent the advance of the heavily armed Serbian army. Where they failed to protect themselves and the civilian population from Serbian superiority, there was terror, destruction and death. A déjà vu that is very reminiscent of the current situation in which millions of Ukrainians find themselves, while Berlin and Paris, for example, are only very hesitantly and in small quantities in supplying heavy weapons to Ukraine to ward off Russian attacks.
Just as Srebrenica was a turning point that led NATO to a new unity, Russia’s war of annihilation against Ukraine triggered a new turning point in the defense alliance – or, as US President Biden put it: a “Natoization” of Europe.
Nevertheless, one hears again these days from Berlin, Paris or Budapest, for example, that one should not “humiliate” Moscow. Others say it’s dangerous to back Putin “into a corner.” Against their better judgement, they are buoyed by the hope that the war in Ukraine is a rather limited affair and that the West as such will not be further affected.
It sounded very similar in the mid-1990s: in a previously unpublished speech on July 19, 1995, the then representative of the UN Secretary-General in the former Yugoslavia, Yasushi Akashi, urged the ambassadors of the NATO Council to continue appeasement towards the Bosnian Serbs. The massacre of over 8,500 Bosniaks in Srebrenica was in full swing at the time, and Serb General Ratko Mladic’s soldiers were preparing to conquer the neighboring UN protection zone Zepa. Akashi urged the NATO ambassadors not to intervene in the conflict. Both sides, i.e. Bosniaks and Serbs, are responsible for the escalation. The Bosnian government is also attacking the UN protection troops. An infamous distortion of reality.
It was this “non-provoking” that led to the first genocide in Europe after World War II. Although two weeks later, under pressure from Washington, NATO drew a “red line” with air raids on Serbian positions around the third UN protection zone in East Bosnia, Gorazde, thus saving its 60,000 inhabitants from death or deportation, the second UN protection zone, Zepa, became the result of resolute inaction and fatal appeasements simply written off.
As in the case of Ukraine, military experts have already announced with regard to the Srebrenica case that the enclave of Zepa, in which a company of Ukrainian peacekeepers was stationed, will also fall within a very short time. Something similar was heard on February 24 this year, when Russian forces began their campaign of annihilation against Ukraine, from former German Brigadier General Erich Vad. From a military point of view, the matter was over and it was only a matter of a few days, according to the assessment of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s former military-political adviser.
Never again genocide
What lessons should the free West, now equally threatened by Russia, learn from the Bosnian war and the parallels to the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Any policy of appeasement towards an aggressor not only encourages him to become more aggressive, but can even lead to genocide.
The indiscriminate and sustained shelling of civilian targets and facilities, such as hospitals and recently the shopping center in Kremenchuk, is barbaric and a clear violation of international humanitarian law. The massacres in Bucha, with over 400 dead, and in Irpin, with over 200 dead, give a vague idea of the terrible scale of war crimes the Russian occupiers may have committed in Mariupol, which was previously inaccessible, and in other places in the Donbass.
The mass deportation to Russia of tens of thousands of Ukrainians, many of them children, is by definition genocide. The US demonstrated in the summer of 1995 how to tame an aggressor by supplying Zagreb and Sarajevo with heavy weapons that could be used to drive back the Serb attackers. This is exactly why Croatia is now a member of the EU and NATO. If Zagreb had not been able to end the Serbian occupation within three days in August 1995 with its military operation “Oluja” (Storm), the country’s Euro-Atlantic perspective would certainly have looked different.
That is precisely why there can only be a resolute, robust attitude towards the Kremlin today. Russia’s objective is clearly to create an economic crisis in Europe this winter, thereby weakening EU support for Ukraine. Not to mention Moscow’s perfidious warfare, which uses hunger as a weapon and seeks to plunge the world into a food crisis.
Europe in particular must therefore ask itself the question of what is worse: feeding the Russian war machine with 1 billion euros a day by means of energy imports and thus risking an imminent genocide in Ukraine and a further Russian escalation on its eastern flank? Or to defend the high value of our freedom and that of our neighbors in the Ukraine and in Eastern Europe with a policy of absolute toughness and with a drastic increase in the sanctions regime and at the same time accepting an interruption in the energy supply?
Because today European security is defended in and by Ukraine, it is not only right to quickly increase the NATO intervention force on the eastern flank to 300,000 soldiers and to expand the Atlantic defense alliance. There must also be no more hesitation on the part of German politicians to immediately and on a large scale deliver additional heavy weapons such as tanks, artillery pieces and anti-aircraft and naval defense systems to Ukraine and to upgrade and retrofit their own armed forces more quickly. The arms deliveries should also be accompanied by a military concept in order to provide targeted support to Kyiv in the development of military scenarios, as the former deputy assistant NATO Secretary General Stefanie Babst recently called for.
The price of freedom is high, not least because of the looming energy and economic crisis. But the price of idly watching an imminent genocide through “appeasement” and losing the civilized struggle for a European and democratic future is significantly higher. For Europe in the 21st century, the following must apply all the more: never again annihilation, never again genocide, never again Auschwitz, never again Srebrenica – the lessons, most recently from the Bosnian war, are the reminder for today and tomorrow at the same time to prevent worse things from happening.
Alexander Rothert is an author and political scientist and has worked for many years at the EU and OSCE as well as at the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Oliver Rolofs is a security expert and was long-standing head of communications at the Munich Security Conference.