“Do you believe that this Putin will comply with a so-called peace agreement or just a ceasefire? If yes, then you also believe in polar bears roaming the Sahara.”
“If we allow the ruling gangsters in the Kremlin to get out of this, the Third World War, with the skin on their noses, then within the next ten years a Fourth World War will follow, and that will be the end of all of us.”
Baden
It’s one of those scorching summer days in Central Europe. I take the tram – yes, there is one – from Vienna to Baden, half a hundred kilometers through vineyards, past small towns, to the right the last spurs of the Alps, to the left the steppe that reaches the Pacific Ocean. My reading is Stefan Zweig’s “The World of Yesterday“, the great author’s wonderfully melancholic portrait of the Europe that perished in the First World War.
Zweig left Vienna on the morning of 29 June 1914 and arrived a few hours later in Baden. He found a bench in the City Park and set about reading. Good citizens walked their children and dogs, soldiers strolled in their best uniforms, the garrison orchestra entertained from its bandstand, cafes and restaurants resounded with gaiety. Suddenly everything went quiet. Zweig looked up from his book (Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s “L. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky”). A depeche from the imperial and royal capital informed the public that Archduke Franz-Ferdinand and his consort had been murdered in Sarajevo.
Six weeks later the war started. The enthusiasm was boundless. Everyone felt confident that the soldiers would be home for Christmas, bringing with them a great victory. Posterity tells different story. The First World War cost 20 million people their lives and sent four empires to the grave: the Austro-Hungarian, the German, the Russian, and the Ottoman. Europe recovered — and recovered too from World War II, which was ignited by a conspiracy between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin has started World War III in Ukraine. Behind him stand China, North Korea and Iran. Ukraine is backed by half a hundred democracies, which understand that this war is a war against the international legal order, a war against humanity and civilization. If the West had reacted with its superior economic and political means and with a measured military response to Russia’s march into Georgia in 2008 and to the First Ukrainian War in 2014, we would probably have avoided the Second Ukrainian War. Now it is there, and it must be brought to its end, where it began, in the Kremlin.
There are whispers in the West that the Ukrainians are ungrateful, that they cannot win, and that we must settle with Putin. It’s Russian-inspired cowardice. The West owes the Ukrainians endless thanks for their sacrifices, and with Western aid, the Ukrainians are winning, albeit slowly. Negotiations? About what? Do you believe that Putin, who has broken the UN Charter, the Final Act on European Security and Cooperation, and the security guarantees that Moscow gave Ukraine in 1994 against Ukraine handing over its nuclear weapons to Russia — do you believe that this Putin will comply with a so-called peace agreement or just a ceasefire? If yes, then you also believe in polar bears roaming the Sahara.
The goal of the war must be the defeat of Russia, so total and indisputable that the Russian civil society, if it exists at all, can be made to think in terms of peaceful international cooperation and competition, away from domination and destruction. The Russians must be brought to the point – like the Germans in 1945 – where they realize their complicity in the massive crimes, committed by Putin and his fellow gangsters in the Kremlin.
In the City Park of Baden good citizens walk their children and dogs, cafés and restaurants echo with cheerfulness. I wonder about Zweig’s suicide in Brazil in 1942. He gave up and failed as a man of spirit. The example to follow – for all of us at this historic moment – is Thomas Mann, who from his exile in the United States thundered against fascism, until the evil was driven out, and democracy could be reestablished in large parts, but painfully not all of Europe.
Today´s Ukraine is an inspiration for all of us, the great repetition of that lesson in active and fighting democracy, which the captive nations further to the west of Ukraine gave us, as they broke out of the Soviet Union in 1989 and thereby caused the fall of the Empire of Evil. It is upon all of us, in Europe and the United States especially, to assist the Ukrainians by all means available on the last few meters on their long way back – that way of death and blood and heroism – to The European House, from which they abducted by the Russians 300 years ago.
If we allow the ruling gangsters in the Kremlin to get out of this, the Third World War, with the skin on their noses, then with in the next ten years a Fourth World War will follow, and that will be the end of all of us.
Author: Per Nyholm
Danish journalist since 1960, based in Austria, columnist and foreign correspondent at the liberal Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten. This text was translated and adapted for The Ukrainian Review by Stanislav Kinka. Per Nyholm´s latest book, “Journeys in the Land of Blood” (Barcelona and Copenhagen, 2023), is freely available to any serious Ukrainian publisher, who might want to publish it.
