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Russia's President Putin
Photo: Kremlin Pool/Kremlin Pool/imago images/ZUMA Wire
The USA's great expert on Russia, Fiona Hill, recently gave a long interview in which she described Putin's war in Ukraine, among other things, as a chain of moments in which you always think: »He really can't do that now. "But then he does it.
"Because he can," says Fiona Hill.
I think that's the best way to describe the powerlessness of Europeans (and Americans) so far.
It is the honorable helplessness of European-Western thinking that has defined sheer evil out of the imaginary world of the possible, because all the rules and patterns of the West since 1945 have aimed precisely at banning sheer evil once and for all, militarily and politically and diplomatic, with trade or with culture.
So as to bury it at least ten fathoms underground on this continent, lest it be found again.
There have been many cruel, completely senseless wars in the world since then.
But almost never in Europe, and if it did, as in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, then the USA and Europe were strong enough to somehow end it and create peace, even if it was with admission to the European Union.
But that a superpower armed with nuclear weapons would start a major war in Europe could not happen in this framework, which, as we know today, was due to our idea of this framework.
The Ukraine war became the mother of all Fiona Hill moments: "He can't be doing this." Yes, Vladimir Putin can, because he broke with post-war Europe and today.
He thinks and acts like in the past, when rulers drew borders on maps and evil was not contained, but free and real: tanks roll.
Missiles destroy residential buildings.
Cities are besieged to which one could fly with Easyjet.
That does something to a lot of us.
And nothing good.
There is, for example, the very German debate about whether Vladimir Putin was always evil and just successfully veiled it over the long years of cooperation and dialogue.
Accordingly, anyone who, like Putin, does monstrously evil today must have had it in mind from the start because it is so monstrously evil.
Of course, to draw such a conclusion is ridiculously under-complex and omits numerous indications to the contrary: that Putin did not march in a straight line from his speech in the German Bundestag in 2001 on the war of annihilation to Ukraine.
Nonetheless, this notion is very seductive because it suggests that the West just needs to shake off its (supposed) effeminate state and "wake up."
Following this logic, the CEO of a large German media group recommends in a commentary to start World War III in order to prevent World War III.
All in all
, smaller he doesn't like to challenge evil, because we Germans have made ourselves small for far too long.
But nuclear deterrence, with its mutually guaranteed destruction if the worst came to the worst, was always just a mixture of madness and rationality; it never had anything heroic about it.
Instead, the Molotov cocktails that the citizens of Kyiv and Kharkiv are preparing to fight Russian tanks in their cities have it.
An American senator, on the other hand, is calling for an assassination squad to be launched against Putin.
Maybe like Osama bin Laden once did, although an Islamist terror force is something different than a nuclear-armed superpower?
Osama bin Laden lived in a cave for a long time, and Vladimir Putin appears on television three times a week.
What's next?
James Bond?
What speaks of these proposals and also of Gerhard Schröder's exorcism in the SPD, where he was listed on the website as one of 34 major social democrats in the gallery of honor until last week and has now been deleted - that is in the better case helpless powerlessness and in the worse chair-farting free guts.
Because, no, Europe and America don't have to reinvent themselves.
For the West, there is no other answer to evil than to be the West: serving international financial capitalism and world trade like a garrotte is something people understand better than killer squads or nuclear first strikes.
And that's just as well.
Neither Germany nor the EU will be able to avoid a deterrent rearmament, but in the short term there can only be larger doses, if at all, of the funds already deployed.
Theoretically, this also includes a total boycott of Russian gas and oil supplies.
But despite the debt we owe the Ukrainians, the question is not whether the measures hurt us more than they hurt the Kremlin boss and Russia.
It's about whether they hurt them in a way that makes them stop going to war.
And that's why the question has to be asked: Does the Kremlin really have to end the war without foreign exchange, even though it is waging it mainly with weapons produced in Russia and recruits pressed for service there?
Nor does Putin use foreign exchange to buy special spare parts for his arms factories, which have been under an embargo for a long time.
With foreign exchange he buys what fills the shelves in Russia's supermarkets.
In order to overthrow Putin, I would be willing to heat less.
But not so that only a few German politicians or editorial writers can actually feel like fat Max.
In short: Rarely has a conflict been cut so crystal-clearly into »good and bad«.
And the West, Europe and America, will have to prove that good is ultimately, terribly archaic, "stronger" than evil, which certainly has a name: Putin.