Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 4
May 9, 2023
The west must be ready for this moment of opportunity and risk in Ukraine | Timothy Garton Ash
Ukrainians are preparing for a make-or-break counteroffensive. They have a theory of victory. Do we?
As you read this, thousands of young Ukrainian men and women are going through their last training drills, checking their weapons and waiting for D-day. In the big Ukrainian counteroffensive that may start any time now, some of them will be killed and many more will be wounded. None will emerge unchanged. We thought we had said goodbye to all that in 1945, but this is Europe in 2023.
Nobody knows what will happen in this campaign. Nobody. But we can at least be clear what we want to happen – and firm in supporting the Ukrainians to achieve it. Decisive Ukrainian victory is now the only sure path to a lasting peace, a free Europe and ultimately a better Russia. This alone would be the new VE Day.
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March 30, 2023
The war in Ukraine reminds us what the EU is for. But even bigger challenges lie ahead | Timothy Garton Ash
Support for the European Union is strong – even in post-Brexit Britain. Can it come through its external battles, too?
It’s springtime in Brussels and the European Union has a spring in its step. Its leaders and institutions have been galvanised by the war in Ukraine. “The war has reminded us what Europe is really about,” people kept telling me on a recent visit to the EU’s capital.
There’s a popular theory that says European integration advances through crises. The truth is that sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. You’d have to be a starry-eyed Euro-optimist, for example, to claim that European unity was really advanced by the 2015-16 refugee crisis. But in its last two big ones, the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, we have seen the “challenge and response” mechanism that the historian Arnold Toynbee identified as one of the patterns of history.
Continue reading...February 23, 2023
How will the war in Ukraine develop during 2023? Our panel look ahead
One thing seems certain: the conflict isn’t going to end soon. But how can Ukraine win? And what is the feeling within Russia?
During the last year, questions of timing – how quickly or efficiently policy initiatives or weapons programmes would work – were often put aside under intense pressure to arm Ukraine as quickly as possible. And most states shared the common goal of enabling Ukraine to defend itself against the Russian onslaught.
Emma Ashford is a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy programme at the Stimson Center, Washington DC, and the author of Oil, the State and War
Continue reading...February 3, 2023
I went viral in Germany for a meme about Scholzing – but the chancellor’s hesitancy over Ukraine is no joke | Timothy Garton Ash
Any credit I got last week for coining a term on Twitter was quite undeserved. The Ukrainians who did need Germany to do more
A couple of weeks ago, at a moment of huge frustration over Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s foot-dragging on allowing Europe’s German-made Leopard tanks to go to Ukraine, a Ukrainian friend WhatsApped me a satirical mockup on “Scholzing”. Next to a photograph of the chancellor, it defined Scholzing, dictionary-style, as: “verb: communicating good intentions only to use/find/invent any reason imaginable to delay these and/or prevent them from happening”. I found this sharp and amusing, quickly retweeted it, and thought no more about it. My Twitter account seemed to be buzzing, but then I’d been writing a lot about the issue myself.
Six days later, I was watching an interview with Scholz on Germany’s ZDF television channel when the interviewer confronted him with “Scholzing”, attributing the coinage to “a British historian”. I went back to my Twitter feed to find that this one quick tweet had been viewed 1.1m times. In German and international media, the definition was being widely quoted as mine. Since, as we all know, the internet never lies, it has now become a historical fact that I thus defined “Scholzing”. (I had incautiously tweeted the meme directly from WhatsApp, so it didn’t show up as something sent from Ukraine. I subsequently clarified this on Twitter, but of course no one reads the clarification.)
Continue reading...January 18, 2023
If Germany has truly learned from its history, it will send tanks to defend Ukraine
While many have pledged support, Germany has a unique historical responsibility toward Zelenskiy and his people. It cannot shirk it
Germany has a unique historical responsibility to help defend a free and sovereign Ukraine. Europe’s central power is also uniquely qualified to shape a larger European response designed to end Vladimir Putin’s criminal war of terror in a way that deters future aggression around places such as Taiwan.
As a signal of strategic intent to measure up to this double obligation, from the past and for the future, the Berlin government should commit at the Ukraine defence contact group meeting in Ramstein, Germany, this Friday not only to allow countries such as Poland and Finland to send German-made Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine but also do so itself, in a coordinated European action. Call it the European Leopard plan.
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Continue reading...December 17, 2022
In Ukraine, I saw the greatest threat to the Russian world isn’t the west – it’s Putin | Timothy Garton Ash
The Kremlin’s imperial war has made its own culture and language a common enemy for people across its former empire
The time has come to ask whether, objectively speaking, Vladimir Putin is an agent of American imperialism. For no American has ever done half as much damage to what Putin calls the “Russian world” as the Russian leader himself has.
This thought came to me recently when I was in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, talking to Ukrainians made refugees in their own country by Putin’s war. “I was a Russian speaker until 24 February,” said Adeline, an art student from the now Russian-occupied town of Nova Kakhovka, referencing the date of Russia’s full-scale invasion earlier this year. Russia has failed to take over Ukrainian culture, she said, so now it has set out to kill it. Several other Ukrainian students told me they find “the spirit of freedom” in Ukrainian literature, but of subservience to power in Russian literature.
Continue reading...November 23, 2022
The best path to peace is not talks with Putin, but helping Ukraine to win this war | Timothy Garton Ash
There will come a time for negotiations – but calls to reach a deal with the Kremlin now are more wrong-headed than ever
As we mark the end of the ninth month of the largest, most brutal war in Europe since 1945, the worst thing we can do for peace on our continent is to push for peace negotiations with Vladimir Putin. The best thing we can do for peace is to increase our military, economic and humanitarian support for Ukraine, until one day it can negotiate from a position of strength.
Donald Trump recently hinted that he might be the perfect candidate to practise the art of the deal with Putin. Silvio Berlusconi has also proposed himself as a mediator. What a dream team they would be together – Moscow’s dream team. Putin would like nothing more than to have a ceasefire in Ukraine while these two sit around his Covid-secure long table in the Kremlin. Meanwhile, the Russian dictator’s battered, demoralised armed forces could dig in to defend the still-large expanse of Ukraine they occupy, regroup, rest, rearm, bring in the recently conscripted reinforcements – and then start up the war again, sending a thank-you consignment of vodka to Berlusconi and Trump.
Continue reading...October 24, 2022
It’s the beginning of the Sunak era – and the end of Britain’s Brexitist delusions | Timothy Garton Ash
The new PM faces big challenges and will probably have diehard Brexiters in his cabinet. But as a realist, he will see the need to steer a new course
The chaotic emergence of Rishi Sunak as Britain’s new prime minister signals the end not of Brexit but of Brexitism – the ideology of delusions about Britain’s ability to go it alone that culminated in the world-beating farce of Liz Truss’s short-lived government.
Trussonomics took the logic of Brexitism to an absurd extreme, with predictable results. Over the past eight years, under this Conservative party, Britain has descended from the pragmatic Eurosceptism of David Cameron to the medium-soft Brexit proposed by Theresa May, to the hard Brexit of Boris Johnson, and thence to the fantasy Brexit of Truss. The Brexit revolution has followed a familiar pattern, except that whereas traditionally the “revolution devouring its children” has involved radicalisation towards the left (Girondins to Jacobins in the French revolution, Mensheviks to Bolsheviks in the Russian revolution), here it has been radicalisation towards the right.
Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist
Crisis at No 10: How long can the Tory government hold on? Join Hugh Muir, Polly Toynbee, John Crace and Jessica Elgot discussing another failed Tory prime minister and what the future holds for the government, in this livestreamed event. On Wednesday 26 October, 7pm–8pm BST. Book tickets at theguardian.com/guardianlive
September 15, 2022
Post-Elizabethan Britain faces a diminished and difficult future – but don’t count it out | Timothy Garton Ash
After Brexit and then the death of the Queen, national unity and global respect are in doubt
After the funeral of Queen Elizabeth, what’s in store for post-Elizabethan Britain? Whatever you think of the institution of monarchy in a democracy, there must be huge respect for her 70 years of dedicated service as an impartial head of state and a unifying figure in Britain and beyond. Yet so much of what she represented is now in doubt.
She stood for the almost paradoxical unity of four nations in a single nation, the United Kingdom. But now the Scots are quite likely to leave the British union in order to rejoin the European one. Northern Ireland increasingly sees its future with the Republic of Ireland, as a kind of informal member of the European Union. Even if Britain doesn’t go all the way back to being just England and Wales, it will need a constitutional reordering.
Continue reading...August 4, 2022
Putin is banking on a failure of political will in the west before Russia runs out of firepower | Timothy Garton Ash
Democratic leaders need to prepare their citizens for a long struggle over Ukraine – and a hard winter
The Russo-Ukrainian war is coming down to a race between the weakening political will of western democracies and the deteriorating military means of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship. But this race will be a marathon, not a sprint. Sustaining that political will requires the kind of farsighted leadership which most democracies are missing. It calls for a recognition that our own countries are also, in some important sense, at war – and a corresponding politics of the long haul.
Is this what you hear when you turn on your television in the United States (where I am now), Germany, Italy, Britain or France? Is this a leading topic in the Conservative party contest to decide Britain’s next prime minister, or the run-up to the Italian election on 25 September, or the campaign for the US midterm elections on 8 November? No, no and no. “We are at war,” I heard someone say recently on the radio; but he was an energy analyst, not a politician.
Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist
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