Away from the scary “if Russia is not stopped in Ukraine, it will not stop at the borders of the Baltics or Poland” to the realistically conciliatory “peace not through victory, but through compromise and, most likely, a painful price for the Ukrainians”?
If we assume that such a shift in rhetoric, predictions and attitudes towards fixing the existing situation and redefining the desirability of development scenarios has occurred or is currently occurring, then where have we and the risks to our national security disappeared from this equation? Does only accepting the real situation and putting Ukraine’s current existential priorities in the foreground automatically allow us to be deleted from this equation of European security and Russia’s aggressive appetite?
The delay in the message about the solution to the problem and its price is related to two rational reasons. First of all, Ukraine’s currently limited ability to win the war for us. Secondly, with the outcome of the US presidential election and Donald Trump’s, as it seems at the moment, sloppy naive approach to the Ukrainian war “peace in 24 hours”. After this pre-election slogan in brackets it is required to write: since we probably won’t force Putin, who left in a nuclear euphoria, to make any compromises, then the Ukrainians will have to make concessions.
We cannot demand and expect Ukraine to win this war on our behalf, saving Europe from Russia’s potential aggression in the future, especially in a situation where the West has not given much and will soon, as it seems, give even less, so that the Ukrainians do not have to do it with their bare hands. It is about something else – so that we Latvians, in my opinion, do not lull ourselves to sleep in the usual constructivism and do not refuse to be aware of reality, no matter how scary it is. Will the threat to our security disappear from the fact that Ukraine will most likely make a choice in a complex process, both domestically and internationally, that allows it not to bleed and hope for a favorable regrouping of its forces and the international situation at some point in the future? Or, on the contrary, will the threat remain and only grow, as we all logically reasoned with our statesmen and experts at the forefront during the first two years of the war? Probably the second option. Therefore, our vision, with which we will evaluate the many movements around the possible scenarios of freezing the war in Ukraine in the coming months, must not for a moment go into abstractions, allowing us to be excluded from this security equation.
Source: www.diena.lv
