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A victim of Russia’s brutal aggression that’s generating a proper humanitarian catastrophe this winter, Ukraine is also stuck between two kinds of Western populism. One is that of Donald Trump and his European far-right equivalents, who don’t care much about either Ukraine or the rules-based order, only their private interests. The other one is that of the anti-Russian (and anti-Trump) hawks who tend to wrap the cynical interests of the military-industrial complex in phoney liberal rhetoric as they pretend to defend the values they don’t truly adhere to — not in Ukraine anyway.
With the Munich Security Conference, Europe’s most important event for foreign policy and military experts, approaching, its longtime chairman, Wolfgang Ischinger, set the agenda regarding the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, which is shifting into its fifth year this month. As long as Ukraine defends Europe, he told the Tagesspiegel, the Russian threat to Europe isn’t huge, but once the war is over, it will increase enormously.
Even as he rushed to deny that he doesn’t want peace to be achieved any time soon, the message was clear: Ukraine is helping European countries to prepare for war with Russia (no matter how implausible this eventuality is looking now, given it presumes Kremlin rulers are essentially suicidal).
At least this is how the Ukrainian ambassador in Berlin, Andrii Melnyk, read Ischinger’s stance. The argument that “Ukraine should bleed out just to buy Europe more time for its own defence” was cynical, he told Ischinger on X. Ukrainians urgently need a ceasefire, insisted the ambassador.
Meanwhile, the idea that peace in Ukraine would be premature remains predominant in a few major European capitals, especially London, as well as inside hawkish American think tanks which have invested their reputation in defeating Russia — a goal that appears to be further away than ever before. Two prominent foreign policy scholars, Michael Kimmage and Hanna Notte, put it far more candidly than Ischinger in a Foreign Affairs piece. “Most important, the US and Europe shouldn’t rush any talks to end the conflict,” they wrote.
This sentiment prevailed at the meeting of the EU Foreign Affairs Council at the end of January, Hungarian foreign minister Peter Szijjarto suggested in an interview. Several European foreign ministers, he claimed, openly stated at the meeting that “the European Union is not prepared for peace”. This echoes Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s claim, made a year ago (according to Ukrainian media), that peace in Ukraine was riskier than war.
The rationale behind these arguments is really hard to comprehend. Western powers have been steering Ukraine towards refusing any realistically attainable compromise for many years. The only result this policy has achieved is that realistic conditions for peace have considerably deteriorated compared to what Ukraine would have been getting by default during the talks in Istanbul in 2022 or Minsk in 2015.
The threat of Russia attacking NATO countries is even harder to substantiate in a rational, unemotional conversation. Direct conflict between Russia and the West, which both sides made a point to avoid in the last four years, means nuclear war, which would end human civilisation as we know it. Economically and demographically, Russia is a dwarf compared with the EU alone, not to mention the combined force of the EU, the US and Britain. It can’t win a war against the West without resorting to nuclear weapons.
An all-out conflict with the West is not a part of the mainstream political discourse in Russia or an ideological goal — unlike the USSR, modern Russia has no real ideology. There is no way Russia would attack NATO countries unless it senses a genuinely existential threat — through the blockade of its Baltic ports or Western-assisted missile strikes on Moscow from Ukraine’s territory. It’s indicative enough that for the last four years, Moscow hasn’t been directly responding to what people like former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson openly call the West’s proxy war against Russia.
Wild claims grossly misinterpreting Russia’s motives and intentions are an integral part of jingoistic populism, which has been fuelling this conflict for years. So, it has turned out, was the false promise of defeating the world’s leading nuclear power by a combination of economic and military means.
Speaking at the Munich conference in 2022, days before the start of Russia’s all-out invasion, the same Boris Johnson — then still in office — said that “Russia must fail and be seen to fail”. Just over a month later, Johnson would help derail the peace talks in Istanbul, which could have ended the armed conflict at the outset, according to top Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia and a plethora of other sources.
Addressing a huge crowd in Warsaw in March 2022, then-US President Joe Biden effectively pledged to topple Vladimir Putin: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”. He also claimed that Western sanctions had “reduced the rouble to rubble” and that the dollar was trading at 200 roubles at the time of speaking. It was a direct lie. The real rate on that day was 95 roubles per dollar. It is less than 80 roubles per dollar today. Last year, the rouble emerged as one of the world’s best-performing currencies, surging by 44 percent against the dollar year on year.
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas kept saying that she believed in Ukraine’s ability to defeat Russia as late as October 2025 — an assessment that completely contradicted the reality on the ground since 2023 when, after the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive, Russia began its slow offensive, which continues today, while Ukraine’s crucial infrastructure is being turned into rubble and the country is rapidly depopulating.
Coming from people who claim to be “liberals”, this unhinged populism creates a paradoxical situation in which certified far-right populists, such as Trump or Hungary’s Orban, as well as the leaders of Germany’s AfD, begin to come across as reasonable and conflict-averse people when it comes to the conflict in Ukraine. They’ve long figured out that they can exploit their opponents’ Russophobia by exposing their incessant lies, exaggerations and unfounded boasts.
The West’s entire policy towards Russia and Ukraine for the last 30 years has been a catastrophic failure, which has created a great boon and an inexhaustible source of political fuel for anti-establishment actors. The never-ending postponement of peace in Ukraine derives from the fact that too many people have been too badly invested in unrealistic outcomes of the war, so they keep buying more and more time to mitigate the impact. But it comes at a huge cost that Ukrainians are paying with their lives and their country’s future.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
