As a humanitarian operations manager, I have seen the best and the worst, especially the worst, of human nature. Moreover, the best and the worst often coexist at the same time and in the same place.
Although I lived through the weeks that preceded it and the beginning of this war in Ukraine, my objective is not to take a position for one or the other, but rather to plead for a return to reason. from all parties. It should be remembered that the number of Ukrainians and Russians injured and killed daily is staggering. And we are talking about a terrifying toll of nearly 300,000 people killed in a year of war.
Are we not able to put an end to the inexorable repetition, generation after generation, of the same errors and the same horrors in the trenches dug by our ancestors?
After the First World War, we were certain that another war, another butchery, was impossible. And yet, World War II struck 20 years later. Each generation thinks it is more evolved, aware, intelligent than the previous one. It is not so. Any war starts from an ego struggle between a handful of individuals. This struggle of egos, these small betrayals, these broken promises are the incubator of what will become decades later major conflicts involving millions of individuals. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War and the creation of an incubator that leads us 30 years later to a new Verdun, the Donbass.
We believed that the European Union, a coalition of 27 countries, could rise above territorial wars and represent a real diplomatic force working for stability and lasting peace between nations. However, and has been for many years, diplomacy has often taken the form of communication effects, broken promises, chin-banging, humiliations and sanctions.
A warmongering Europe
This European Union has sold, since the end of the Second World War, to the generation of baby boomers that “Europe is peace”. However, the acclamation, not to say the jubilation, reserved for the Ukrainian president who came to ask for weapons, ammunition, tanks and combat planes in Brussels, showed us a warmongering Europe. Yet war is not a party, not a celebration, not an euphoric spectacle. The political leaders and MEPs are in the process of shutting themselves up, with the peoples they represent, in a military escalation of which they seem neither to take the measure nor to realize the possible consequences. And that without mentioning the fact that the European countries do not have the military means of their ambitions, having considerably reduced their military capacities, blinded by their dogmatic certainties that “Europe is peace”, that “the NATO protects them” and that the nuclear weapon alone represents “deterrence”.
What is the doctrine of the countries of the European Union? Once they have exhausted their meager supplies of ammunition, weapons and ground vehicles, they will send in their fighter planes.
And then, when hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Russians, Ukrainians and nationals of other countries have been killed, whether nuclear weapons have been used or not, when Ukrainian and Russian Oblasts have been disfigured and uninhabitable for decades, is that when we will wrest peace? A peace like in 1918, humiliating Germany in a train car? This peace that led us 20 years later to the Second World War, resulting in the death of millions of people? This is why this military escalation against a background of misplaced exaltation and without a long-term vision cannot be a viable strategy and even less a doctrine.
The quest for victory at all costs is not the path to peace. It is the quest for peace that is the path to victory. This victory will be a lasting peace based on negotiations and then on genuine diplomacy between nations.