In an emergency, the West was forced to support the heroic Ukrainians with arms, so much does their resistance hold on the moral level of a “just war”. But indirect and — coldly — calculated support, it goes without saying, so that the urgency of putting out, through diplomacy, the infernos of this war in which civilians are caught in the nets of the international balance of power; where, through the perpetration of patent crimes against humanity, there is a growing tendency to trivialize violence in international relations.
In this context, the proposal that Poland will present at the extraordinary NATO summit on Thursday in Brussels to set up an international peacekeeping mission in Ukraine did not deserve to be swept under the carpet, as the did Joe Biden right away. The United States inevitably played a role in the slow rotting of a conflict which leads today to the bloody headlong rush of Vladimir Putin. A conflict about which one can also ask “what is the use of NATO if it ends up endangering those it intends to protect”, wrote recently in The duty political scientist Jacques Lévesque.
In the immediate future, several Western countries claim to take responsibility for what is happening in Ukraine by promising to increase their defense budget to 2% of their GDP in order to meet NATO requirements. The most striking case is obviously that of Germany, which, pledging in February to massively increase its military budget, found itself calling into question in a spectacular way the foundations of its foreign policy based essentially on the development of trade. Other countries, such as Denmark and Sweden, have followed suit, while, at the same time, Russian aggression provides grist to the mill for the construction of a “Europe of defence”, an idea dear to Emanuel Macron. As for Canada, which is traditionally not the most proactive member of NATO, it would be surprising if Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Finance and hawk of the Trudeau government on the matter, did not energize Canadian Defense when she tabled the budget. Federal, in April.
Given the scale of Russian aggression and the extremes to which Putin, whether “defeated” or not, seems able to go, public opinion generally welcomes this drive for Western militarization as a necessary evil. Fine, but there is still reason to wonder about the social and political repercussions of this militarization and to worry about it, in a world where the arms trade is close to 100 billion US dollars year after year. — although this figure is probably underestimated, considering the opacity of this industry. The confrontation with Russia guarantees the perpetuation of an arms race which never seems to run out of steam. But now is not the time to talk about it…
Moreover, the West is not without hypocrisy or contradiction in its defense of “democratic values” when it comes time to ensure the development of its military industries. Spread the word. Arms sales to Saudi Arabia are the mother of all examples. The United States did not become the world’s leading arms dealers without undermining these values.
In the tragic and specific case of Ukraine, the fact is that the prism of the defense of “values” through which we are made to see this war did not prevent Europe from supplying Russia with military equipment between 2015 and 2020. And this, despite the embargo on arms sales to Russia, imposed since July 2014 by the European Union in the wake of the annexation of Crimea and the establishment of the two “separatist republics” in the Donbas. This is how, relying on a convenient “legal vacuum”, ten European countries, France in the lead, exported there for 346 million euros (480 million Canadian dollars), according to public data analyzed by Investigate Europe, a team of journalists from eleven European countries.
These 346 million euros in military equipment (bombs, rockets, torpedoes, missiles, guns, etc.) do not perhaps represent a huge sum in view of the whole business weapons, but the fact remains that some of these weapons could very well end up on Ukrainian soil and be used to commit the abuses we are witnessing against civilians. Which is shocking to say the least and which is not without scratching the common front that our Western leaders claim to present, united against Putin as one man — because it is a terribly masculine world.
We don’t ask our leaders to be perfect. They are asked to defend in the most consistent and transparent way possible the democratic principles of which they claim to be the guarantors.