Why the West Is Afraid of Ukraine’s Victory

On the first day of Russia’s all-out war against Ukraine, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner met with then-Ukrainian ambassador to Germany Andriy Melnyk. As Melnyk later recounted, Lindner didn’t simply decline to supply Ukraine with weapons or disconnect Russia from the SWIFT payment system, as Ukraine had “a few hours left” of its sovereignty. It became clear he was preparing to discuss the future of a Russian-occupied Ukraine with the puppet government that would be installed by the Kremlin. This reflected a general attitude: The West at the time thought it would be easier if Ukraine simply surrendered.

An uncomfortable truth about Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine, so plainly obvious that it’s usually overlooked, is that it became possible not only because it was conceived and carried out by the aggressor but also because it was allowed by bystanders. The biggest blow to democracy on a global scale was not the war itself but the fact that—despite all “never again” claims—European and Western countries in general agreed and accepted beforehand that another European nation might be deprived of its sovereignty, freedom, and independent institutions, and it might find itself militarily occupied. (If this isn’t how they felt, then they wouldn’t have evacuated their embassies in Kyiv.)

So far, the West has been having a good war in Ukraine—above all, because its present course still allows the West to behave as if the war is not its own. The West’s political discourse, rationalized in the ivory tower language of non-escalation and nonprovocation, is still basically about how best to ensure that exposure to the continued risk of military aggression and death is restricted to Ukrainians. In a basic sense, the West has always been afraid of a Ukrainian victory.

On the first day of Russia’s all-out war against Ukraine, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner met with then-Ukrainian ambassador to Germany Andriy Melnyk. As Melnyk later recounted, Lindner didn’t simply decline to supply Ukraine with weapons or disconnect Russia from the SWIFT payment system, as Ukraine had “a few hours left” of its sovereignty. It became clear he was preparing to discuss the future of a Russian-occupied Ukraine with the puppet government that would be installed by the Kremlin. This reflected a general attitude: The West at the time thought it would be easier if Ukraine simply surrendered.

An uncomfortable truth about Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine, so plainly obvious that it’s usually overlooked, is that it became possible not only because it was conceived and carried out by the aggressor but also because it was allowed by bystanders. The biggest blow to democracy on a global scale was not the war itself but the fact that—despite all “never again” claims—European and Western countries in general agreed and accepted beforehand that another European nation might be deprived of its sovereignty, freedom, and independent institutions, and it might find itself militarily occupied. (If this isn’t how they felt, then they wouldn’t have evacuated their embassies in Kyiv.)

So far, the West has been having a good war in Ukraine—above all, because its present course still allows the West to behave as if the war is not its own. The West’s political discourse, rationalized in the ivory tower language of non-escalation and nonprovocation, is still basically about how best to ensure that exposure to the continued risk of military aggression and death is restricted to Ukrainians. In a basic sense, the West has always been afraid of a Ukrainian victory.

There are three central reasons for that fear. The first is the West’s profound non-revolutionism. Ukraine is now bearing an unthinkable price for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the so-called Friedliche Revolution (or Peaceful Revolution) of 1989 that was so much celebrated in Germany. It was famously called Die Nachholende Revolution, the “catch-up revolution,” by the de facto German state philosopher Jürgen Habermas—a term that symptomatically reveals the basic Western understanding of Eastern Europe’s role after the collapse of the communist bloc. The only task the region was assigned was simply catching-up with the West regardless of its actual historical experience. The ongoing war shows that this catch-up revolution became a catch-up regression into complacency, mirroring the general trajectory of the West after the proclaimed “end of history.”

Ukraine’s victory over Russia would indeed mean a genuine revolution for the West. It would require, foremost from Europe, a radical transformation. Eventual European Union and NATO enlargement are necessary—but only what lies on the surface. That is the same reason why the European Union couldn’t accept the political outcomes of Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution of 2014. As a political marketplace—or agora, in ancient Greek—reclaimed by its citizens, the Euromaidan revolution dragged Europe back to its roots of democracy, justice, anti-oligarchy, and freedom. In its revolutionary nature, Euromaidan was so fundamentally European that it turned out to be too European for today’s EU. Ukraine appeared to be a test that Europe failed to pass. But Euromaidan is not just a story of an exciting revolutionary past; it has allowed Ukraine to survive and effectively resist Russia’s atrocious war of aggression today.

In reality, Ukraine has experienced three Euromaidans—all different but driven by the same political intention. The first one in 2014 was a revolutionary Euromaidan, which successfully opposed an authoritarian bloody assault on society. The second one in 2019 was an electoral Euromaidan, which elevated to the presidency a person capable of maintaining the state during an existentially critical moment. And the third one was a war Euromaidan, when the whole country became one armed revolution opposing Russia’s military invasion in February 2022. The juxtaposition of the first and the last is pivotal—in 2014, the Euromaidan social movement was against an internal oppressor, the state repressive apparatus seized by a criminal autocrat; in 2022, the Euromaidan movement unified with the state to resist an external military oppressor. The history of the Euromaidan thus demonstrates that revolutions can improve the state in a progressive direction, away from authoritarianism—indeed, this is exactly why Russia launched a war of annihilation against the country.

The second reason the West cannot come to terms with a Ukrainian victory over Russia is because of its own colonial legacy and its current post-colonial position. The West has effectively shifted its experience with colonialism to the past and maintains a blind eye toward colonial experiences in other parts of the European continent. This is motivated in part by a bad conscience as well as the West’s own self-recognition and direct involvement in these ongoing experiences of oppression. Europe’s East is invisible in the Western post-colonial discourse precisely because it is so central.

Long regarded as a periphery between Western and Russian metropoles, Eastern Europe has struggled with Russian imperialism for decades at the very least—and in some cases even centuries. But after World War II, the West’s dominant approach toward Eastern Europe was best expressed through Germany’s misnomer Ostpolitik, in which the actual East was avoided to actively deal with imperial powers in Moscow. And when the EU established its Eastern European policy, called the Eastern Partnership, it was described as a policy toward outlying “neighborhoods.” The countries of Europe’s post-Soviet East were assigned a functional role of borderlands or buffer zones that provided huge benefits for the EU in terms of various supplies and resources while exposing those states to Russian revanchism. Despite intending to overcome the historical division of Europe and political isolation of its East, the EU indulged in its repressed colonial mindset and separated itself from the so-called under-civilized, second-hand Eastern Europe.

But Europe is a strange thing—its center lies in its East, exactly where the fate of the whole continent and much beyond is currently being decided on the battlefield. The unwillingness of former Western metropoles, Berlin and Paris in particular, to recognize and accept the full-fledged agency of post-Soviet European countries, determined by a usual post-colonial habit, actually explains constant foot-dragging and weapons delivery delays to Ukraine. A central issue here is the right to violence and who deserves it, which has always been decisive for the history of colonialism. From a hegemonic viewpoint, it is the colonized who are not supposed to be equipped to apply violence—much less to win. It is only the colonizers who are allowed to fully possess and dispose of the right to violence at their own discretion.

A third reason why the West fears what Ukraine’s victory would mean has to do with time and the war itself. The “never again” slogan, the EU’s common ideological denominator, has become a self-fulfilling prophecy in a perverted sense. Indeed, if one literally accepts the principle that “it should never happen again,” then war is thought of as impossible simply because it’s unimaginable in spite of realities on the ground. The EU has fetishized the idea of peace to the extent that it completely repressed the realities of war—only to be totally unprepared when the repressed came back.

It was exactly that moment of unreadiness that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz famously called a Zeitenwende—an epochal shift, literally a turn of times. In truth, especially in the German case, the proclamation of a turning point hides an intention toward its opposite—that things would be better if they remained as they were. Its real political name is rather a Zeitverschwendung, a waste of time, as it is Ukraine that is now buying time for the West, paying an immense price every day to do so. What characterizes the West’s constant belatedness and inability to act is a time out of joint, to quote William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It’s a profoundly wicked logic that requires another mass grave to trigger the next set of sanctions against an aggressor or deliver a minimal portion of arms to a country in dire need.

There has been so much talk in the EU over the last seven decades of how Europe relates to its history and learned its lessons from the past. But what is history if not the knowledge of time and what time means, the knowledge of how to act in time? If you talk so much about history but at the same time are always too late in your actions, perhaps there is something wrong with the story you present about yourself. Zeitenwende is actually a form of political self-deception that shows how hard it is for the West to really be contemporary, to keep pace with the demands of the present.

A proper understanding of time and place are the basic requirements for any appropriate political action. Violent events like revolutions or wars especially depend on time—if one doesn’t act when needed, then the situation only deteriorates and becomes more violent. As Europe, unfortunately, is already at war, the West will inevitably have to act more decisively and directly. At the moment, it prefers to think the war will drag on in its present form, where there are no boots on the ground from other Western nations. But the actual choice the West is currently confronted with is either to apply all the military, political, and economic means it has without delay to defeat Russian aggressors and restore Ukraine’s borders or to intervene when that aggression has proliferated elsewhere and Eastern Europe has become a battlefield again.

It’s a question of time. And it’s indeed a Hamletian choice.

The time is out of joint/O cursed spite!

That ever I was born to set it right!