To add some context on the view from Europe, I am sharing an article by a very respected German constitutional court judge (retired). The interesting thing is that he is criticising the prevailing public opinion in Germany and taking a stand almost diametrically opposed to it, so you get both sides of picture. The original article is published in
Feeling
As is well known, people who are in great distress and fear tend not to tell each other how badly they are doing. With distance grows the need to share in the suffering of others in a strangely unifying way.
Now, compassion and sympathy are certainly not suspicious motives; they are rightly regarded as a high human quality in the evolutionary, social and psychological sense. But one has to be careful: Rarely are voyeurism and pleasure in not suffering oneself so cheap and also available with such fervor of being good. In fact, everyone knows that too. That is why they despise and punish the "gawkers," the "onlookers," the "disaster tourists" who are always the others. If you ask the "gawkers" themselves, they are always there out of pity.
Battle plans
In the case of foreign war, there is something else. For example, a great desire to punish, the pleasure of finding and torturing guilty people, traitors and enemies, not least in their own ranks, as punishment for fear. That is why Russian bagged soups are removed from shelves, Russian singers are thrown out of ensembles, and friends of Russians from dog-breeding clubs and parties. I don't know if the Hospital Association, the Patient Protection Foundation and the institutions of geriatric care have already asked all Russian nurses, orderlies and doctors either to wear gowns in Ukrainian national colors or to resign. Anything seems possible at the moment.
There is a personal level, there is a social level, and there is a state level. War takes place on the state level. There, personal courage is useful, but not necessary. Deserters are shot, draft dodgers are conscripted. Those in the trenches no longer have to worry about courage or fear. Nor, by the way, about the enemy. The enemy is where you shoot; from the pragmatic point of view of the company commander, this already follows from the fact that you would not shoot otherwise. It does not matter whether the enemy is nice, has just finished his medical studies or is also afraid. A KraussMaffei PzH 2000 self-propelled howitzer can shoot 30 kilometers with standard ammunition, 55 kilometers with V-LAP ammunition; 20 rounds in two minutes. At this range, it's not about heroes.
Of course, you can't say something like that if you don't want to be accused of hero contempt and traitorism. And not in Russia and not in Germany either. That's why 95 percent of war reports deal with the personal: fear, courage, depravity, ruthlessness, grief, suffering, hope. And even the worst enemy is trivialized to a psychopathic patient: On March 5, the "SZ" (a newspaper) devotes a whole page to the question of how Mr. Putin feels in the Kremlin.
Right and wrong
War is always about right and wrong. Whereby the right is always on one's own side, the wrong on the side of the opponent. "Violence decides between equal rights," said Karl Marx. He did not mean equally good or equally right, but equally powerful rights. Every general in the world agrees with him.
However, being right is neither a prerequisite for war nor even a guarantee of victory. That, whether and why "actually" the losers should have won is a retrospective analysis that has occupied countless generations of historians and political scientists; in the concrete case of war it is of no significance. Therefore, it must be clearly stated: the war in Ukraine will not be decided on the basis of what is right. Whether the Russian attack contradicts international law and is a crime only matters if there is a power that can enforce that law, that is, an overwhelming, greater power. Such a force exists in the form of the military potential of NATO, or rather, the United States. The problem is that the use of this force would make the question of who is "right" finally insignificant, because it would lead to the destruction of the whole of Europe and considerable other parts of the world.
This brings us to an area that is uncomfortable for people who want to feel protected in the warm nest of being right. This area is about politics, statesmanship and proportionality.
The government of a state is at least as responsible to the welfare and lives of its citizens as it is to being right, to heroism and to the principle of self-defense. In other words, waging an unwinnable war may be extraordinarily courageous, but it can also be very wrong. Now, one may object that the question of whether a war is unwinnable can always be answered definitively only afterwards. That is true. This is where the field of probability, strategy, military and political science begins. If it did not exist, the world would sink into a perpetual turmoil of battles.
Strategies
Specifically, what are the possibilities for Ukraine to win the war against Russia? Answer: None, unless third states intervene militarily or Russia would be threatened economically on an existential scale in the short term. The latter is not possible, the former is not seriously conceivable in view of the danger of nuclear war, because there is no way to get behind the logic of the threat of joint suicide.
The result: Ukraine will most probably lose this war. Neither justification nor pity will change this. If this result were certain, everyone would agree that it would be absurd and senseless to let several million people die for the sake of defeat. Is it really more sensible if and as long as the probability of victory is one or five percent? Do we really want to encourage Ukrainians to send their young generation to heroic death? German leading media ranting about the approaching "domestic warfare" of the civilian population against the Russian army?
People, very much including Germans, tend to sympathize with emotional images of holding out in "almost hopeless" positions, in castles, fortresses, etc. The purely politically motivated "strategy" of the Nazi elite to "declare" whole cities as fortresses during the World War was a particularly absurd and silly example of such romanticization of war and a crime against their own people. One may say (some do) that Ukraine should become Russia's Vietnam. This is an exceedingly cynical invitation of third parties to unimaginable suffering. No father and mother in Germany in their right mind would currently send their children to Ukraine to become "heroes" there.
The question is: What is the alternative? The alternative to defeat with very many casualties and tremendous destruction is defeat with few casualties and less destruction. One could, in other words, surrender. That would be a terrible defeat before the unjust violence. But 1000 living defeated are better than 1000 dead. And unlike death, victories never last forever.
If the analyses of the military and political strategists, who are now shooting out of the ground by the hundreds, are correct, then the war was lost a long time ago: When they trusted "Russia," when they disarmed, when they supposedly indulged in "illusions" (but meanwhile left no stone unturned to weaken Russia). Well then, we can talk about it when it is over. To iron out the old mistakes (if there were any) quickly by means of nuclear war would be a particularly stupid idea. And should the USA want to wage a nuclear war with Russia, Germany would certainly not be the part of the earth's surface whose protection would be particularly dear to both sides.
So what to do? If Russia wants to agree to "neutralize" Ukraine: So be it. The European Union, and Germany in particular, can help the Ukrainian people: Open the borders as much as it can. For ten million Ukrainians who are displaced. There is enough money; Mr. Scholz is known to have a money bazooka. Three days ago, the domestic policy spokesman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group declared on DLF that "of course" the remarkable creed "2015 must not be repeated" does not apply if and insofar as people "from our own continent" are concerned. Rarely has racism sounded more noble. But after all: It does work! Let us follow the call of "Bild" (4. 3.): "Welcome in our hearts and homes!" However, one will have to move together, and many will feel a little less well. On Sunday, March 6, the word "refugee crisis" was now heard for the first time. Berlin, capital of freedom, is said to be on the verge of nervous and administrative breakdown again.
Oil and gas
The assumption that Germany and the EU could now go into a kind of reverse gear and return to the fine days of security in the 1950s to 1980s is completely absurd. Enthusiastically, therefore, all those who are afraid of the confusion of the new world are pouncing on it. One can understand this and also have temporary sympathy for it; however, this does not make it any more intelligent. Russia will continue to exist, Ukraine will continue to exist. The Putin system will pass away, the USA will continue to change rapidly, as will China.
The German chancellor and his economics minister Robert Habeck are right: Of course, one should continue to buy oil and gas from Russia, eat Russian soup and let Russian singers sing. Whether one confiscates the "oligarch" ships in Hamburg is of secondary importance. However, one could take the opportunity to confiscate a few Arab, American and Chinese boats and use them to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean.
Of course, one must take precautions not to become a victim of warlike violence oneself. Whether one must therefore fall into enthusiasm over Scholz's 100 billion (The German army's budget has been increased by this much as an exceptional measure), the jingling of which, far from the constitution and beyond parliament, allowed the Chancellor of the Uncertain to mature into the Chancellor of Conscience, I dare to doubt. Most recently, one could read in the business section that the defense industry must finally be included in the subsidy programs because of sustainability. The German is like the Russian and the cockroach: no crack remains unused.
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. This has become more of a media management warfare now!