Europe Checks Out of Hotel Ukraine, Can It Ever Leave?

ATHENS — Have you heard the news? Europe has checked out of the Ukraine maelstrom and is off to the beach. Vladimir Putin has again turned on the Nord Stream pipeline after 10 days of supposedly scheduled maintenance, but the gas flow is at most 40 percent of what it should be. Millions of Europeans thus stand to be shivering this winter, as the Russian strongman drags their leaders through a costly cat-and-mouse game. Right now, though, there’s a heat wave on, and as for the bloody war on the edge of NATO’s eastern flank, well, as some on the Continent are wont to say, c’est la vie. President Macron, in his annual Bastille Day interview this month, took a more enlightened approach to the war that has seen more than 22,000 Ukrainian civilians perish in the ruined city of Mariupol alone, more than 1,600 in and around the capital, Kyiv, and thousands more, with hundreds of children among the casualties. Of this conflagration, which is closing in on its five-month mark, Mr. Macron had this to say to the French: “We did not start it and we are not involved.” Those words speak for themselves. Yet Britain has a nascent Ukraine fatigue problem, too. When the outgoing prime minister, Boris Johnson, told the British parliament, “Hasta la vista, baby,” it threw into sharp relief an impending absence of Downing Street’s comity with Ukraine in its current struggle, because Mr. Johnson was the very public face of it. British military support for Ukraine has not diminished and may yet increase, in continued cooperation with Washington, but Britain is now taking a breather from the European mess as it grapples with power struggles of its own. Incidentally, does anyone think that Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss will be able to fill in for Mr. Johnson when it comes to hashing out battle strategy with President Zelensky? Or particularly willing?Italy’s Mario Draghi, who resigned the prime ministership just in time for the languorous Italian summer holiday season, was also a staunch ally of Mr. Zelensky. Snap elections are coming in September to the eurozone’s third-largest economy, but in the meantime the former leader of the Five Star party, Luigi Di Maio, told Politico Europe: “The Russians are right now celebrating having made another western government fall.” On a somewhat less cynical note, he added: “Now I doubt we can send arms [to Ukraine]. It is one of the many serious problems.”Oh, and then there’s the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who has already reneged on a pledge to pump more than 2 percent of GDP into defense spending. It turns out that Germany will not hit that NATO target until 2026, which a politician from the Christian Democratic Union party, Ingo Gadechens, told the newspaper Bild ia “a stark contrast to the Chancellor’s announcements.” For all the media chatter about Russia’s rusty “kit,” as the Brits put it, Germany’s war metal isn’t in such fine fettle, either: The Telegraph recently reported that the Bundeswehr (the German armed forces) “already struggles to maintain the equipment it has, with only a third of it believed to be in working order.”The European inability to put a finger in the dike of a militant Kremlin is only magnified by a growing frustration not just with Russia but also Ukraine. Early on in the invasion, Mr. Macron’s now discredited coziness with Mr. Putin was seen as not only a show of wishful European brotherhood — Russia and France do have certain cultural ties — but as throwing an arm around French corporate titans like TotalEnergies, which even after the introduction of sanctions continued to make beaucoup de bank in Moscow. Ukraine was absolutely getting in the way of that — and still is. Relations between Ukraine and Greece, one of the most important and also most reliable members of NATO, are in freefall since a Ukrainian cargo plane that took off from Serbia with a payload of sophisticated weapons en route to an uncertain destination crashed in a field near Kavala, a northern Greek city, last week. Athens summoned the Ukrainian ambassador over the disaster, complaining that Greece should have been alerted to the dangerous cargo inexplicably flying over its airspace. Since that incident, Ukraine has actually threatened Greece with sanctions over a number of Greek companies still operating in Russia, according To Vima, a credible Greek newspaper. Whether the companies in question are now subject to EU sanctions is not clear at present, but Ukraine’s beef is paired with protests about what To Vima characterized as “the transfer of Russian oil to third countries by ships of Greek interests.” Needless to say, Athens thinks Kyiv doth protest too much. Shipping is as essential an ingredient to the Greek economy as grain is to that of Ukraine. None of this will end well. It is very easy from a sunny sidewalk café in St-Germain-des-Prés or secret rave in Mitte to write off the Ukrainian calamity as just another chapter in Europe’s history book. There may even be a grain of sagacity in such an idea, given the sheer thickness of that volume. The thing about European ghosts, though, is that they often cut their chains when Europeans are the least prepared for their racket. Deadly missile strikes, indiscriminate shelling, the danger of spillover: This is the daily reality now. In Europe, summer’s torpor makes for a seductive but ultimately phony cover for the Russian cacophony to come.

Europe Checks Out of Hotel Ukraine, Can It Ever Leave?

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