One choice for Europe: Defend Ukraine with your own blood or appease Russia

This week’s acrimonious breakup of the latest ceasefire talks between Russia and Ukraine has for the moment forestalled Europe’s quaking nightmare: That the US may broker a deal and leave Europe to implement it. The White House Dealmaker in Chief is confident that giving Putin some Ukrainian territory and an assurance that Kiev will never join NATO will be enough to end active hostilities for a decade, if not permanently. America’s European allies are less sanguine, particularly if any deal drops sanctions on Russian fossil fuel sales and allows Putin to restore his battered military. In their view, anything short of a Russia defeat will only provide a respite for Putin to rearm and resume his conquest of Ukraine at a later date. President Zelensky seeks security assurances from the US equivalent to a proxy NATO membership, something the White House is very reluctant to offer. Any deal will need to endure without the help of the American military.

Sceptics of an agreement with Russia point to the sad history of the treaties that marked the end of the Cold War. The Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) set limits on major armaments from the Atlantic to the Urals, backed by a verification regime giving Western inspectors access to military facilities throughout European Russia. The Confidence and Security Building Measures (CSBMs) agreed in 1992 mandated prior notification and inspection of military exercises. Not surprisingly, the secrecy-obsessed Russian military detested these agreements. Putin threw his generals a juicy bone when he suspended Russian CFE participation in 2007, and withdrew from the treaty altogether in 2015. The post Cold War “deals” lasted only until Putin decided to discard them, just before he invaded neighbouring Georgia in 2008. Rule-based European security failed to deter Putin’s neo-imperial designs.  

Could Europe act without the US to make a ceasefire more durable than these evanescent arms control accords? Europe cannot today deploy forces large enough to defeat the Russian army, but France and Britain have considered a tripwire force in eastern Ukraine designed to trigger a Western military response. The Cold War embedded this concept in NATO strategy: A “layer cake” of national armies stacked along the inner German border ensured that any Soviet offensive would be an attack on the entire alliance, and most specifically on the United States. This forward defence tripwire kept the peace despite the Soviet’s overwhelming advantage in conventional forces. 

But a tripwire works only if it is linked to an overwhelming, automatic response. The consequences of violating a ceasefire deal must be dire and obvious, even to an autocrat sequestered behind a phalanx of Kremlin toadies and yes-men. NATO’s tripwire worked because it was backed by a credible American deterrent, both nuclear and conventional. The US invested vast national treasure in bombers and missiles aimed at the Soviet Union, and commanded by the likes of General Curtis LeMay, the living embodiment of massive nuclear retaliation. Annual REFORGER exercises rehearsed the rapid deployment of American units from the United States to equipment prepositioned in Europe. Without a link to American conventional and nuclear forces, a tripwire of European forces deployed in Ukraine would need to be tied to French and British nuclear deterrents and a practiced flow of massive numbers of Western troops into the country.   

Yet European ambitions for strategic autonomy remain oblivious to the test of securing a ceasefire should one emerge. Even after a deal, Ukraine will remain unfinished business to the rabid nationalists ruling Russia. There is no pro-Western leader awaiting the ouster of Putin and ready to re-join the fabled “Common European Home.” Neither France nor Britain is willing to extend a nuclear guarantee to Kyiv, and Europe cannot now muster the reinforcements needed to defend Ukraine from a renewed Russian assault. The US has made it clear that its priorities are the Pacific and the Western hemisphere, leaving Europe to secure an independent Ukraine with a future in the EU. As Winston Churchill remarked when Britain stood alone against the Nazi war machine, “…send me one American soldier and I will see to it that he is killed”.  Europe must offer its own soldiers linked to a robust European deterrent if it is to thwart a Russian leader contemplating renewed hostilities.

Some very difficult decisions await Europe before it can deter Russian designs on the country. Given Europe’s great economic and industrial superiority to Russia, there is no material reason it cannot generate the military capacity to meet this challenge. But the lack of a unified military command outside NATO and a host of conflicting national priorities forestall the creation of a credible, unified deterrent. Overcoming these obstacles is essential if Europe is to assume what it sees as its rightful role as a strategic actor in the game of Realpolitik.  

Europe faces a stark choice. It must either act to defend Ukraine with European blood and treasure, or concede that its best strategy is appeasement of Russian designs on the country. One requires Europe assume responsibility for the defence of Ukraine, perhaps for decades. The other offers cheap gas and social welfare programmes unburdened by military spending. Talk of autonomy is cheap and easy; deterrence is difficult and expensive.