“We are convinced that Putin will lose this war”, hammered Monday August 21 Volodymyr Zelensky during his recent European tour. Above all, don’t give up. Eighteen months after the start of the conflict provoked by Russia, the Ukrainian president is on all fronts. Alongside his army, which has been trying since June to reconquer, meter by meter, field by field, road by road, the territories occupied and mined by the Russians. At the cost of immense losses, hundreds of thousands of wounded and killed, because of the blindness of a dictator.
Alongside Western leaders, to remind them that in Ukraine the future of Europe is NOW at stake. That their help – in F-16s, in shells, in military training, in humanitarian aid, in financial sanctions against Russia – is vital, but unfortunately insufficient and too late. What will happen in the fall of 2024 if Donald Trump wins the battle of (almost) octogenarians for the White House?
As Raphaël Glucksmann tells us, we are going through a perilous moment. One more, after the financial crisis of 2008, the migration wave of 2014, Brexit, or the Covid pandemic. Except that this time, it is urgent for the European Union to react. To emancipate oneself from its slow and bureaucratic decision-making patterns. To know, once and for all, what she wants, what we want, we democratic countries, representatives of a great world power. Europe is no longer in 1938. From the tyrants of the 20th century and from its own interwar procrastination, it has learned.
“Europe was not made, we had the war”, later regretted Robert Schuman in 1950, at the dawn of Community construction. The Europe of 2023 knows that Putin will lose this war. Provided you have the means. On condition of not listening to those who plead for the party of capitulation. Europe, from Churchill to de Gaulle via Simone Veil or Volodymyr Zelensky, has never taught us resignation. In the name of 44 million Ukrainians and 450 million Europeans, let us resist. And let’s be convinced that Putin will lose this war. Resignation begets renunciation.