![]() ![]() Building on President Joe Biden’s historic February 20 visit to Kyiv to underline enduring U.S. The United States and its allies must clarify and emphasize that they are supporting Ukraine on the battlefield to uphold the United Nations Charter and international law. Building an international coalition against Russia’s aggression to facilitate an eventual settlement of the war will require the same. Redefining European security and restoring deterrence will involve explicitly countering this narrative. We have spent more time contemplating the perils of provoking Russia’s mercurial president, Vladimir Putin, than the merits of bolstering Europe’s resilience and capacity to limit Putin’s coercive power. Instead, after 2014, European leaders, led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, rushed to push Russia’s annexation of Crimea to one side and broker a quick peace settlement in Donbas - the Minsk Accords, which would have limited Ukraine’s sovereignty if fully implemented. Indeed, one might even ask, “what were the redlines?” The West certainly did not appear to uphold the postwar principle of ensuring independent states’ sovereignty and territorial integrity. Western deterrence failed in part because American and European policymakers never meaningfully emphasized the West’s redlines. None of the United States and Europe’s mechanisms and practices for keeping the peace after World War II and during the Cold War had much, if any, effect on deterring Russia from seizing Crimea or attempting to take Kyiv and the rest of Ukraine in 2022. The European security environment was ruptured in 2014 when Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and sparked off a brutal proxy war in the Donbas region. ![]()
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