Editorials

The Irish Times view on the invasion of Ukraine: ghosts from a terrible past

A new political, economic and psychological wall is being constructed before our eyes

Firemen extinguish a fire inside a residential building that was hit by a missile on Friday in Kyiv, Ukraine. Photograph: Pierre Crom/Getty Images

Fri Feb 25 2022 - 21:00

The immediate horror of the Russian invasion has been visited on the people of Ukraine. It is they who have been subjected to a murderous and flagrantly criminal assault that may plunge them into years of violent turmoil.

Yet John Donne's ominous words come to mind: "Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee". Vladimir Putin has tolled the knell of an era of relative peace and stability in Europe. For all of us, the reverberations will linger in the air for many years to come.

In 1989, the then leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, conjured the idea of a "common European home", a concept that "rules out… the very possibility of the use of force or threat of force – alliance against alliance, inside the alliances, wherever".

It began to seem, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet empire, that this might indeed be the direction of travel for our continent. Even the terrible violence that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia did not negate the feeling that Europe was moving into a genuinely post-war epoch.

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Putin has now trashed the common European home. Perhaps he has even demolished it. His invasion of Ukraine is not just about the bringing to heel of a country whose very existence he regards as an affront to the mystical notion of a greater Russian identity.

It reorders the European continent along a new frontier of division and hostility. A new political, economic and psychological wall is being constructed before our eyes.

The ideal of a new, shared European space has been shattered. The ghosts of the continent's terrible 20th century, in which Ukraine was so often the worst killing ground of conflict, genocide and incalculable suffering, have been summoned from the past, not just into the present, but into the foreseeable future. Putin has made Russia a pariah state by choosing to discard the last vestiges of democracy, the rule of law and respect for international order. His nakedly totalitarian polity will sink ever further into the repression of its own people and the bullying and subversion of its neighbours.

Europe is thus diminished, forced as it is now, to define itself, not with, but against Russia. We must accept, with deep sorrow, that a country that has given so much to European culture has set its face against all of that culture’s best values. The immediate response will, and must be, negative – the use of every possible form of sanctions to raise the price of Putin’s aggression.

But, in the long struggle that has now begun, it must also be positive: the deepening of democracy, the defence of legality, the reassertion of respect for human life and human rights.

That is what Europe means now.

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