War in Europe

Slate ^ | August 29, 2014 | Anne Applebaum

[No One Special]

Putin has invaded Ukraine. Is it hysterical to prepare for total war with Russia? Or is it naive not to?

WARSAW, Poland—Over and over again—throughout the entirety of my adult life, or so it feels—I have been shown Polish photographs from the beautiful summer of 1939: The children playing in the sunshine, the fashionable women on Krakow streets. I have even seen a picture of a family wedding that took place in June 1939, in the garden of a Polish country house I now own. All of these pictures convey a sense of doom, for we know what happened next. September 1939 brought invasion from both east and west, occupation, chaos, destruction, genocide. Most of the people who attended that June wedding were soon dead or in exile. None of them ever returned to the house.

In the past few days, Russian troops bearing the flag of a previously unknown country, Novorossiya, have marched across the border of southeastern Ukraine.

In retrospect, all of them now look naive. Instead of celebrating weddings, they should have dropped everything, mobilized, prepared for total war while it was still possible. And now I have to ask: Should Ukrainians, in the summer of 2014, do the same? Should central Europeans join them?

I realize that this question sounds hysterical, and foolishly apocalyptic, to American or Western European readers. But hear me out, if only because this is a conversation many people in the eastern half of Europe are having right now. In the past few days, Russian troops bearing the flag of a previously unknown country, Novorossiya, have marched across the border of southeastern Ukraine. The Russian Academy of Sciences recently announced it will publish a history of Novorossiya this autumn, presumably tracing its origins back to Catherine the Great.

[LjubivojeRadosavljevic]

I?It is in our interest we (the west NATO nations) supply Ukraine with the weapons it needs to rid itself of the Russian invaders...It is in our interest we (the west NATO nations) supply Ukraine with the weapons it needs to rid itself of the Russian invaders.

Mkay, well ask yourself, why did not the US supply weapons to Georgia when Russia made their embarrassing invasion of Georgia....perhaps you've forgotten this little detail?