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Is it still possible to avoid a major war in Europe? | Timothy Garton Ash

The west is more united than it has been since the cold war – but the future of Ukraine hangs in the balance

“I think Putin will invest Kyiv,” the Nato general told me. For a moment, I thought I had misheard. Then I realised he was using the verb “invest” in the old military sense of surrounding a city without actually occupying it. That single word measures how far we have gone backwards in Europe over the last 15 years: from a world where invest means investing money in a place – to a world where invest means besieging it with an army.

Russian president Vladimir Putin declared his personal war on the west 15 years ago, in his 2007 speech to the Munich security conference. At this year’s conference, from which I have just returned, everyone was struggling to understand how we have come to the verge of what might be the largest war in Europe since 1945 – and whether we can still prevent it. For all the last-minute diplomacy, Russia continues to advance towards major military action. Its propaganda claim of a Ukrainian attack across its border and a theatrically televised evacuation of women and children from the separatist para-statelets of Donetsk and Luhansk are obviously designed to provide a fraudulent justification for Russian aggression. At this time of writing, we don’t know exactly what form the next aggression will take, but as German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier said the other day, Russia already has a noose around the neck of Ukraine.

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist

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