Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Changed Europe Forever. Here’s How

Four years on from Russia’s full-scale invasion, the economic, political and security fallout is reverberating far beyond Ukraine’s borders.Author of the article:You can save this article by registering for free here. Or sign-in if you have an account.(Bloomberg) — Industrial chemicals have been produced on the banks of the River Elbe outside the city of Wittenberg for more than a century, from the Kaiser era through wars, Communism and the chaotic collapse of East Germany.Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Then came Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine and a crisis without parallel for SKW Stickstoffwerke Piesteritz GmbH, which traces its pedigree in producing specialized chemicals for agriculture and industry back to 1915. The loss of access to Russian natural gas meant a dramatic increase in costs energy-intensive industries across Europe, from chemicals makers to autos and machinery. The government in Berlin has made inroads finding replacements since cutting off fossil-fuel imports from Russia following the 2022 invasion, yet the consequences are still playing out for companies like SKW Piesteritz, Germany’s biggest producer of ammonia and urea.Get the latest headlines, breaking news and columns.By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.The next issue of Top Stories will soon be in your inbox.We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try againInterested in more newsletters? Browse here.“It is no longer a question of profit margins or cuts in investment,” said Chairman Petr Cingr. “It is simply a matter of the survival.”Vladimir Putin’s all-out invasion of Feb. 24, 2022, has devasted Ukrainian cities, claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and forced more than 10 million people to flee their homes – almost 7 million of them abroad. The effects of the largest land war on the continent since World War II have spilled beyond Ukraine’s borders and caused an era-defining shock to Europe’s economy, politics and societies. The conflict is raising existential concerns over Europe’s ability to resist or coexist with an aggressive Russia under Putin, and its state of readiness if he isn’t stopped in Ukraine.“We must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents and great-grandparents endured,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warned in a December speech.The dilemma for the continent’s leaders is made all the more acute by President Donald Trump’s antipathy toward Europe, casting doubt on US security guarantees and even stirring fears of military intervention to seize control of Greenland from NATO partner Denmark. That sense of transatlantic rupture is accentuated by US pressure on Kyiv to halt the conflict on terms that look favorable to the aggressor, while Europe is consigned to the sidelines. The result is a set of war-induced shocks that show the international order “is currently being demolished with a wrecking ball,” Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the annual Munich Security Conference, told reporters on Monday as he presented the program for this year’s event on Feb. 12-15.It’s a particularly precarious moment for Europe. Squeezed between an unreliable US and a China that’s vying with Washington for technological and military supremacy, Europe’s collective response to the war in Ukraine has become a test of the continent’s ability to shape decisions affecting its own fate. “It’s become clear that Europe doesn’t really have a lot of geopolitical power in his world,” Anna Rosenberg, Amundi Investment Institute’s head of geopolitics, told Bloomberg Television.“Because in this kind of multipolar world, what counts is that you have military might, ideally in the form of nuclear weapons, that you have the natural resources that someone else depends on – food, energy, rare earths, for example – and that you have a lot of partnerships.” Only in the latter category is Europe strong, she said. The message has struck home, seen most visibly in NATO members’ decision in June to agree to Trump’s demand that they spend 5% of gross domestic product on defense. Assuaging NATO’s dominant player was undoubtedly one motive for that decision, but it was also an acknowledgement of the urgent need to rebuild militaries that were allowed to languish after the Cold War’s end. “The biggest change has been that Europe has woken up and shifted into defense mode across a broad front,” said Henna Virkkunen, European Union Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, noting the shift is all the more remarkable because the EU was created as a peace project. With intelligence agencies publicly assessing that Moscow could launch an attack on a NATO member within five years or less, Virkkunen’s native Finland and neighbor Sweden abandoned non-aligned status to join the alliance in 2023 and 2024 respectively. That’s turned the Baltic Sea into a NATO-dominated theater and ensured that seven of the eight Arctic nations are members. The UK and Norway, both non-EU nations, have drawn closer to Europe in their shared stance against Russia. Even as Putin dismisses the idea that he is seeking direct confrontation with the West as “hysteria,” regular cyberattacks, drone intrusions and arson attempts attest to Moscow’s willingness to engage in hybrid warfare to unsettle civilian populations. The war in Ukraine is reshaping multiple aspects of European policy accordingly. One government official complained that EU finance chiefs have been compelled to become experts in defense so that they can recognize military terms and understand procurement rules in order to responsibly agree on some sizeable outlays. Moral authority in the EU has accrued to eastern members like Poland and the Baltic states that long warned of Putin’s intentions. Enlargement is back on the 27-nation bloc’s agenda, with Ukraine and fellow former Soviet state Moldova offered a path to membership. And while cracks have appeared with leaders more friendly to Putin in the likes of Hungary and Slovakia, the bloc has managed to maintain unity to introduce multiple rounds of sanctions on Russia and aid for Kyiv. Many changes seem irrevocable. China’s refusal to condemn Putin has been a stumbling block too far for the EU, which is reassessing its relations with Beijing. Before the war, Russia was by far Europe’s top external supplier of both oil and natural gas. Those flows have been heavily reduced or diverted elsewhere, at the cost of significant economic fallout, and replaced by a mix of alternative suppliers and new infrastructure. The upshot is a trade relationship that survived the Cold War is not going to snap back overnight — and may never return to its pre-invasion state. Spool back to late 2021, and it came as a shock to NATO when then-US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines briefed the alliance, making clear for the first time that Russia aimed to take Kyiv. “I remember listening to this and [it] feeling like a punch in the gut,” recalled Oana Lungescu, NATO spokesperson at the time and now a distinguished fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute. NATO decided then on the unprecedented step of declassifying intelligence to provide details of the Russian forces amassed on Ukraine’s borders and call on Moscow to step back from the brink. Those efforts to deter Putin continued up to the last minute, with a NATO-Russia council called for Jan. 21, 2022. The Russians turned up with maps on which NATO member states were not marked as such. Those present wondered whether it was a mistake or a deliberate attempt to destabilize, Lungescu said. The answer came the following month. She sees two main lessons: Despite being the world’s biggest country in territorial terms, Russia “remains an imperial expansive project.” The second: “Russia is not invincible; the Ukrainians have shown that.”Ukraine has also shown the changed nature of modern warfare, reminding militaries of the need for tanks and artillery before pioneering the use of cheap first-person vision, or FPV, drones to dominate the battlefield. In today’s drone wars, the front line is a “kill zone” patrolled from above, while combat units are supplied by remotely operated tracked vehicles that take away the dead and injured. Ukraine has become a real-time testing ground for new military technologies, an increasing number of which are now domestically produced, while European defense companies like KNDS NV, Leonardo SpA, and Diehl BGT Defence GmbH can’t supply their products fast enough. Where resources were once scarce and government orders small, “now the challenges are about how fast and massive your production is,” said Camille Grand, secretary general of ASD, the European defense industry’s main trade association and a former NATO assistant secretary general.NATO has refocused on its founding remit of collective defense, he said, even as the US casts doubt on its Article 5 commitments and makes clear that Europe is responsible for its own security. “If we believe that Europe and NATO could be tested by Russia in a post-ceasefire Ukraine, the message from Washington to Europeans is: `You are the first respondents ,’” said Grand. “Europeans have to deliver the cavalry.”A foretaste came early in 2025, when the US withheld weaponry and intelligence after the infamous Oval Office clash with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Washington later relented, though Europe is now paying for US equipment delivered to Kyiv. Trump’s subsequent determination to impose a peace deal and rehabilitate Russia, as codified in his administration’s eye-popping National Security Strategy, looks to many in Europe like a permanent breach of the transatlantic bond. “What we once called the normative West no longer exists in this form,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said in December — a significant statement for someone who grew up under the US security umbrella that formed the bulwark against the Soviet bloc. It speaks to the depth of the rupture, but also points to the paradox of Germany’s role as perhaps Europe’s best hope of a sovereign future. While the world’s No. 3 economy, Germany’s export-oriented, auto industry-heavy economic model has been shown to be uncompetitive, overly beholden to China, and vulnerable in an age of a receding multilateral order. Merz and his coalition are strong on support for Ukraine but weak domestically: unpopular, and trailing the far-right nationalist — and Kremlin-friendly — Alternative for Germany party in some polls. For all the wobbles, Berlin’s determination to rearm is real: Hardly a day goes by without a new military order announced by the government or its industry partners. Lawmakers approved a record number of arms contracts under a €50 billion spending splurge in December. Voluntary military service is returning, with the prospect of conscription if enough young people don’t fill the ranks. Rheinmetall AG’s share price has soared more than 1,600% in the past four years. Berlin is “creating massive military muscle,” said Amundi’s Rosenberg, helping Europe as it does so.Growing global relevance is not universally welcomed at home, however. With Berlin now NATO’s No. 2 spender after the US, the AfD has a ready appeal to those voters in the former East Germany more predisposed to Moscow than Washington. In the former West, German militarization runs into residual pacifist sentiment that peaked during protests against the stationing of US missiles in the 1980s. Given Germany’s wartime history of atrocities, Merz’s suggestion that the Bundeswehr could help secure a demilitarized zone in Ukraine was shocking to many.Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul has reached back further, evoking Germany’s post-World War I experience to explain Berlin’s opposition to a bad peace deal for Ukraine. In 1918, Germany was made to cede territory and pay reparations under the punitive terms of the Versailles treaty, contributing to the rise of the National Socialists under Adolf Hitler. Wadephul cited the parallels in a December meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, when asked why Ukraine couldn’t just hand over Donetsk to Russia to resolve the war. For Ischinger, a former German ambassador to the US, past convictions of eternal peace in Europe with Russia as a partner have been exposed as “massive illusions.” With Germany spending big on rearming, Europe is on the road to becoming “a meaningful and substantial military actor,” he told Bloomberg Television.That isn’t just a contrast with the time before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ischinger said: “It’s a massive change from what we had over the last 30 years.”—With assistance from Kirsi Heikel, Alaric Nightingale, Rachel Morison, Francine Lacqua, Agnieszka Barteczko, Julian Lee and Michael Nienaber.Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. Please keep comments relevant and respectful. Comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. 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