Statement on the Ukraine Crisis

The end of peace should not be the end of peace policy

Foto: Tom Barrett, Unsplash, Unsplash License.

Last night, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an attack on an independent and sovereign state. This attack was not preceded by any aggression against Russia. All attempts by the Russian govern­ment to justify this action on humanitarian grounds or as a peace­keeping mission are a transparent instrumenta­lization of inter­national norms. The initiation of this war is a blatant breach of inter­national law that cannot and must not remain without consequen­ces. The ongoing and impending human suffering of Ukrainians and Russians caused by Vladimir Putins decision and by the actions of his enablers and the Russian govern­ment marks a devastating tragedy.

Harsh sanctions must now be enacted against the Russian govern­ment and economy. The time for scaled sanctions is over. Never­theless, sanctions alone will not solve the crisis, and are unlikely to persuade Russia to change its policy in the short term. This makes it all the more important to embed sanctions measures in a multi­laterally coordinated diplomacy. Sanctions are successful when they are threatened or imposed in a coordinated and unified manner by as large a group of states as possible. Opportunities for de-­escalation must always be offered by keeping forums and channels for negotiations open, or by opening new ones.

Not least, the danger of the current crisis lies in the general rejection of diplomacy, cooperation, and trust. To claim that blind German (and European) confidence and trust­fulness got the West into this situation and that it would have been better to consistently treat Russia as an adversary is to forget history. Without the policy of common security, Germany would not be united today, many states in Eastern Europe would not be democracies today, and the nuclear arms spiral would never have been halted. Common security is possible, and cooperative peace and security policy is not a mistake only because Vladimir Putin is in the process of destroying the architecture of European security.

There is no question that there will be no quick way back to common security, to the peace and security order as we knew it. The shock and the loss of confidence are too deep-­seated. In terms of European and global policy, we are back on square one, only under different conditions, due to the rise of China as a major power.

The great challenge for the future of inter­national relations is to build new cooperation structures – in Europe and the world. Such structures will initially be quite basic in character and based on mere deterrence. In a further step, one can move to peaceful coexistence, as in the Cold War, which would mean recognizing the domination claims of the other side and renouncing mutual de­stabilization.

A further step would be the transition to a cooperative order of common security and shared values. That develop­ment along this path is possible may seem hard to imagine to some in the current crisis. But the history of the Cold War shows that such a development is possible. And the task of peace and conflict research is to point to this possibility and to help shape it. The end of peace should and must not be the end of peace policy. On the contrary, it must be the beginning of a new reflection on the future of a European and global peace order.

A more detailed analysis of the current situation is available on the PRIF Blog.