Europe will act only when Russia causes disaster, Chatham House fellow

The Russo-Ukraine war failed to convince Europe that Russia poses an existential threat to the continent – or to take its defense spending seriously. That’s the bad news. The good? Unfortunately, there’s none, says Keir Giles, the author of Russia’s War on Everybody and Who Will Defend Europe? and Senior Consulting Fellow at Chatham House.

In an exclusive interview with the Euromaidan Press, he bluntly states that unless there’s an attack on a European country that directly impacts the interests of France or Germany, Europe will continue to be asleep. Especially since many European leaders are happy to accept Donald Trump’s potential ceasefire.

There’s only one thing that has changed since February 2022 in favor of pro-Ukraine advocates. Find out what it is in our interview.

EP: The NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels is happening as we speak. Yet, the Alliance’s chief, Mark Rutte, has already made it clear that Ukraine’s membership talk is off the table once again. Will there ever be an end to this dithering? 

KG: No, there won’t be an end to the dithering.

If we listen to what President Zelenskyy said when offering ways in which Europe could safeguard its future by giving NATO membership to the free parts of Ukraine, I believe he did so because he knew it wouldn’t happen.

First, NATO doesn’t do things immediately. Second, there are strong members of NATO who are absolutely opposed to resolving Europe’s security problems in that manner. 

I believe it was a way to call NATO’s bluff. The Alliance is unwilling to do what it takes to secure the European continent, though it is its original purpose.

EP: I know that you’re probably talking about several countries like the US, Germany, and more. Why are they so ardently against Ukraine’s membership?

KG: Due to very specific psychopathologies that you have to explore in each country’s opposition.

Some countries are subverted by pro-Russian interests, like Hungary and, to some extent, Slovakia. 

Germany, of course, has its own historical and current political reasons for not being able to address the problems that face it.

Put all of it together, you have a failure to resolve the situation. 

EP: The UK has changed its stance slightly over the years toward Ukraine in general and NATO’s membership as well. Could it perhaps influence countries like the US foremost?

KG: I don’t think the UK has changed that much.

It’s been fairly consistent in terms of recognizing the challenge and what actually needs to be done to address it. It has always been traditionally one of the foremost supporters of Ukrainian resistance while some other countries were very willing to write Ukraine off.

So the shift isn’t dramatic, unlike France’s, which made a 180-degree turn from wanting to partner with Russia for European security to understanding that European security’s biggest threat is, in fact, Russia.

However, the UK’s capacity to provide practical support for Ukraine, bolstering its defenses or influencing other NATO member states to understand what needs to be done to safeguard the common security of Europe is relatively limited. The current government is also unwilling to undertake the gear change required to face the problems effectively.

Only a catastrophe that costs the lives of many people will do

EP: If Ukraine doesn’t become a NATO member state, then obviously, we have to discuss more or less two options. Either it gets nukes. Or it goes down Israel’s or Switzerland’s path in terms of building its defense model. Is that at all viable?

KG: I don’t know anybody who takes the discussion of Ukraine rapidly acquiring its own nuclear weapons seriously. 

I believe that is the logical outcome for a number of different countries that have looked at the success of the Russian nuclear intimidation of the United States. But the steps from that logical outcome to actually bringing it into fruition are not as simple as buying a nuke off the shelf.

As for the hedgehog model and making Ukraine resilient enough to withstand Russian pressure on its own, it’s a long and difficult process. If there were to be an end to the fighting, that is.

But it is also a weapon that cuts both ways. 

Russia will use any ceasefire or negotiated settlement to build up its own military strength even faster because Ukraine is not busily eroding it and addressing it as fast as Russia can build it.

EP: From what I hear, it sounds as if certain people out there are willing to have the ceasefire to just make the case closed, no?

KG: Unsurprisingly, plenty of people across Europe would like the whole problem to go away and take the ceasefire as evidence that the problem has been solved as opposed to simply shelved or postponed. And go back to business as usual.

People, including in many centers of European decision-making, are still not convinced that the war on Ukraine is not a temporary crisis but evidence of the systemic and existential challenge facing Europe.

EP: Could you be more specific about where this kind of sentiment prevails?

KG: Lots of different places. You encounter it in London too where some believe that a ceasefire is not just a palliative but an acceptable solution.

It’s even more pronounced in, for example, Berlin and, to some extent, still in Paris despite the change signaled by President Macron.

EP: So, what does it take to change their minds? Or are they too rigid to be changed?

KG: Only a disaster. There has to be a sufficiently catastrophic outcome. This is what it takes for them to wake up and realize that a unified European response is the only thing that will keep us all safe.

EP: It seems like rather than pre-empting things, we just let them develop, right? And you’re likely referring to a catastrophe akin to a potential nuclear strike of some sort?

KG: Not even necessarily that. For example, an attack on another country that directly impacts the interests of France or Germany.

Or Russia stepping up its campaign against infrastructure or the airliners in a way that impinges indiscriminately on the lives of European citizens from a number of different countries who think that what’s happening in Ukraine is someone else’s problem.

EP: But do people in Europe, for example, understand that if Trump manages to freeze the conflict, Europe will have to spend? He was pretty blunt about who’s expected to foot the bill. Also, the U.K. and France were talking about the potential deployment of troops before the UK changed its mind. That’s also costly. Does Europe understand that this problem will not go away and that they will actually have to pay for this?

KG: It’s not Trump’s fault that so many governments across Europe have shirked their responsibilities to protect their societies, economies, and countries for so very long. All Trump has done is throw the consequences of that into sharp relief so panic gripped a number of European capitals when he was re-elected because they know they’ll be confronted with the results of their decades-long decisions.

But there’s a big difference between people’s understanding and even that of some mid-ranking officials. We’ve seen in a number of different countries that some ministers and intel chiefs are ringing the alarm bell, but the topmost decision-making level doesn’t act accordingly.

This was the case with Downing Street 10 and 11 when the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer were simply not willing to give that priority direction and to pay for it. Labor also showed that, as a hard-left government, they have very different priorities from those of national defense.

EP: Europe’s NATO spending, in particular, leaves a lot to be desired. One of your books is titled rather bluntly Who Will Defend Europe? So, who will –  if Europe is living in this postmodernist mantra while the rest of the world, including Russia and China, they’re still very much 19th century-like? The average person, as you said, understands this, but the top brass isn’t convinced. How do we go about this?

KG: You do have examples of successful changes of attitude and approach by senior European leaders. Like Macron, who, as people around him described it, was radicalized by disappointment because he thought, like many before, that he’d be able to work with Moscow. He tried, he failed for obvious reasons and, as a result, he became a Russia hawk.

The same happened to Boris Johnson who went through the same process just a few years earlier. This is something I described in my previous book Russia’s War on Everybody.

The problem is that as soon as they’ve gripped the Russia problem, European leaders often get replaced because we live in democracies. The same holds true for businesses, the military, and the media, where rotation also takes place. 

So, we’re back to what I said earlier. Until something sufficiently dramatic is thrust in the faces of European leaders and forces them to act, there seems little prospect of anything changing. The downside of this is that when it happens, it tends to come at the cost of the lives of good people.

More “Putins” will come after Putin

EP: On the subject of dealing with Russia. Many in the US fear its collapse and potential nuclear chaos, which is one of the reasons behind the “escalation strategy.” I believe, and many would concur, that Russia will never be a classic democracy led by someone like Yuliya Navalnaya or Ilya Yashin, a ridiculous notion for a Ukrainian like myself altogether. So, if a ceasefire happens, Putin goes fully unpunished and dies eventually, more “Putins” will spring up, and we’re back to square one. Is there any way of communicating this so it doesn’t upset the Westerners? Because they seem to be very upset about this.

KG: I think that that understanding has sunk in, and again, that’s both among the ordinary people and “concerned citizens” looking at Russia and the leadership. We no longer get asked what happens after Putin because people understand that what happens after is more of the same. 

So optimism has faded, and it’s easier in some respects to explain that Russia is a long-term problem, not a current crisis.

The other form of optimism that there’s some kind of meaningful opposition that might actually make a difference is harder to eradicate. Until it is disproven beyond doubt, I think it will persist because it is very hard for Western believers in a liberal democracy to accept that there is no meaningful opposition to the view of Russia, espoused by Putin.

EP: Do you believe that Trump’s peace push will happen? Because some people are doubting it.

KG: I think there is no doubt that Putin will help Trump deliver something because Russia wants to make its man in the White House look good.

What that will actually be is another question. It would be relatively easy to arrange something that Trump could claim as a win, which would make very little difference to the situation on the ground. Even though a ceasefire is disastrous for the future safety of Europe, it might nevertheless be welcomed not just by Trump but by some European politicians.

We should think back to the period immediately before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine when everybody knew that it was going to happen. The widespread assumption across a lot of Western analyses and, apparently, Western governments as well that there would not be effective resistance and Ukraine would soon be under Russian domination altogether.

So, what were all the conversations about then? About enabling Ukraine to resist and to survive as a country under occupation while maintaining that military resistance in a way that we saw, of course, after the last time Moscow overran Ukraine in 1944-45, and the resistance continued for a decade or more onward.

The worst-case scenario that we’re facing at the moment is that Trump, in some way, brings about a situation where Ukraine is forced either to submit to a ceasefire or does not and is effectively overrun because the support from the United States evaporates altogether.

EP: So, you think that Trump is 100% going to try to submit Ukraine and not do anything to actually impact Russia? Because I’ve talked to different people, and they express different opinions as to what he wants to do. Do you think that he will try to make Ukraine do what? Cede territory? Or what’s submission in this case?

KG: We don’t know exactly what leverage he thinks he has on Ukraine to try to get Ukraine to stop fighting.

There is a lot of Trump optimism out there due to his unpredictability and irrationality, which are viewed as an asset. So what if he does something totally different from what he is expected to do and actually, that turns out to be a roll of the dice in Ukraine’s favor?

But that is really a measure of the extent to which Ukraine and its supporters have gone from disillusioned in the support from the Biden administration to furious with its unwillingness to back Ukrainian victory. Because that would necessarily entail Russian defeat and the current administration is more terrified of a defeat of Russia than it is of the destruction of Ukraine.

EP: But if you keep bleeding the country, don’t want it to win, and know that it doesn’t have the resources, isn’t that also a form of submission?

KG: I think that is the mirror image of the thinking that seems to have been driving some of the American decision-making because, yes, there was at some point an aspiration to weaken Russia and to bleed Russia slowly.

The tragic side effect of that is that the process also weakens Ukraine and bleeds Ukraine. That is why there has been fury at the immorality of the United States approach under the previous administration.

That explains in some part why some in Ukraine have been more sanguine and less panic-stricken at the arrival of Trump than some people across Europe because there’s the open question for Ukraine itself.

The ongoing paradox is that the US is the biggest Ukraine supporter in terms of volume by far. But also the one that has caused the greatest soul-searching in terms of the actual nature of its support for Ukraine.

So, no wonder people are saying, well, how much worse can it get under a different US administration?

Nothing to look forward to

EP: What are the specific steps Ukraine and its partners could take to improve things in terms of influencing people in Europe and Washington D.C. to make sure that the ceasefire format comes in the most beneficial format for Ukraine?

KG: It’s hard to see what else the Ukrainian government could possibly do because it has been working extremely hard and extremely effectively to get the message across. It is not the fault of the Ukrainian government or the most active among the coalition backing it that the message simply has not sunk in. Or that the Western states do not enhance support for Ukraine or build up their own defense. 

The European governments keep perceiving the idea of spending more on defense as riskier than leaving your country more or less defenseless and potentially defeated in a conflict, which will blight the futures of your children and grandchildren for generations to come. When that decision is tested – as it probably will be in the not-so-distant future when Russia makes its next move on Europe – the people who made those decisions will be safely retired or dead.

EP: Well, Angela Merkel is still alive, but she doesn’t seem to be regretting anything.

KG: She’s probably on a fairly healthy pension. Why should she care?

EP: Exactly. Is there at least one optimistic takeaway?

KG: No, I don’t think there is one, sadly.

Now add the decades-old decisions where Western European countries, in particular, worked on the assumption that war was something that happened to other people and would never affect their homeland. That has left Russia with a very large number of soft targets across Europe. If it wants to make its next move toward undermining NATO after the situation in Ukraine is parked temporarily. 

All of that, of course, leaves Putin in precisely the position that he wants to be, which is with large parts of Europe helpless before him.

The interview has been shortened and edited for clarity.