The many decades of peace that Europe enjoyed after 1945 were a historically unprecedented achievement in which defence spending declined and armies shrank dramatically. “Where have all the soldiers gone?” asked one analyst of this transformation. Up until a month or two ago, polls showed that large numbers of the continent’s inhabitants regarded war as an anachronism, an outlook unchanged by the fighting that accompanied Yugoslavia’s break-up in the 1990s.
No longer, however. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its second month, we find ourselves back in a world many Europeans thought they had left forever — one where terms such as annexation and partition, security guarantees and neutrality are bandied about across the conference table while bombs fall, trenches are dug and cities are left in ruins. In short, in the midst of Vladimir Putin’s war, Europe is once again confronted with the necessity for peacemaking.
“This war is unwinnable,” UN secretary-general António Guterres said this week. “Sooner or later it will have to move from the battlefields to the peace table.” Bilateral meetings between the belligerents started nearly a month ago and have so far failed to produce any agreement. Predicting further suffering all round if the fighting drags on, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has in the past few days been calling with increasing urgency for “meaningful talks” between the two sides. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, on the other hand, has discouraged ceasefire hopes and said that talks were going “much more slowly and less substantively than we would like”.