The day after Russian tanks and troops poured across the Ukrainian border on Feb. 24, NATO leaders received a deeply frightening message. The alliance’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, opened an emergency video summit by warning that President Vladimir Putin had “shattered peace in Europe” and that from now on, he would openly contest the continent’s security order.
However unlikely, Stoltenberg told the leaders, it was no longer unthinkable that Putin would attack a NATO member. Such a move would trigger the collective defense clause in the North Atlantic Treaty, opening the door to the ultimate nightmare scenario: a direct military conflict with Russia.
President Joe Biden spoke up swiftly. Article 5 was “sacrosanct,” he said, referring to the “one for all, all for one” principle that has anchored NATO since its founding after World War II. Biden urged allied leaders to step up and send reinforcements to Europe’s eastern flank.
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Within hours, NATO had mobilized its rapid response force, a kind of military SWAT team, for the first time in history to deter an enemy. In a few frantic days, the West threw out the standard playbook that it had used for decades and instead marshaled a stunning show of unity against Russia’s brutal aggression in the heart of Europe.
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A “new normal,” Stoltenberg called it.
In truth, these 10 days in February shook the world. It was anything but normal.
Much as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 set off a tumultuous cascade of changes across Europe, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought the West to a comparable, if far more ominous, historical reckoning.
The shock of Russia’s invasion led Germany to discard six decades of military-averse policy rooted in its own wartime experience. Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced the Germans would ship Ukraine thousands of rockets and missiles — as well as embark on a $110 billion rearming program at home.
It led the once-divided European Union to unite behind choking sanctions. Brussels pledged to spend $500 million on defensive weapons for Ukraine.
It led Biden to recast a presidency that had been focused on rebuilding America after the coronavirus pandemic and confronting China to one that is waging a twilight struggle against a Cold War rival on the plains of Eastern Europe.
It has reverberated not just in the councils of state, but also in corporate suites, cultural institutions and sports leagues — to say nothing of city streets from Mexico City to Madrid, where tens of thousands of demonstrators have waved the yellow-and-blue Ukrainian flag and chanted against Russia’s aggression.
Overnight, oil giants like BP, Shell and Exxon walked away from gargantuan investments in Russia. Technology companies like Apple halted sales in Russia, while Google pulled Russian media off their networks. Sports bodies like FIFA and the International Olympic Committee barred Russians from competing.
For each of these institutions, such actions would have been inconceivable only a week earlier. Although the United States and its allies had labored quietly for months to lay the groundwork for sanctions, the readiness of much of the West remained in doubt.
On Feb. 19, five days before Putin set his army in motion, Ukraine’s embattled president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, flew to a security conference in Munich to issue a frustrated challenge to Western leaders: “What are you waiting for?”
To trace the 10-day period before and after Russia’s invasion, in the worlds of geopolitics, business, culture and sports, is to see how Putin’s brazen attack made the inconceivable suddenly inevitable.
None of these momentous moves, it must be said, have succeeded in halting the Russian war machine. Ten days on, Europeans are girding themselves for a prolonged siege in Ukraine, facing a future that is menacing and unmoored. On Saturday, Putin likened the West’s sanctions to a “declaration of war.”
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An Accusation of ‘Appeasement’
Few in the elite crowd gathered for the Munich Security Conference late last month believed Russia would go through with a full-blown invasion. Despite detailed warnings in intelligence declassified by the U.S. and Britain, many said Putin was playing an elaborate bluff.
Zelenskyy was the star attraction at the gathering in Munich. When he stepped to the podium, Zelenskyy was deliberately undiplomatic.
“What do attempts at appeasement lead to?” Zelenskyy asked. The post-World War II security order, he said, was a poor match for the predations of leaders like Putin. “They do not keep up with new threats,” he said. “They are not effective for overcoming them. This is a cough syrup when you need a coronavirus vaccine.”
Germany’s Surprising Reversal
Scholz was only two months into his new job when he got a taste of Putin’s ambitions. It came in a nearly four-hour meeting in Moscow on Feb. 15.
Ukraine, Putin told Scholz, was historically part of a Greater Russia that had been unraveled by a series of tragic mistakes. Ukrainians and Russians were “one people,” he said.
The gravity of the situation became clear six days later when Putin declared that Russia was formally recognizing the separatist territories, Donetsk and Luhansk, a move that was widely viewed in the West as a prelude to invasion.
With war seemingly hours away, Scholz acted quickly, and unexpectedly. Shortly before noon Feb. 22, he announced that Germany would scrap Nord Stream 2, an $11 billion undersea pipeline that would transport gas from Russia — and provide Putin with significant leverage over Europe. A subject of tortured debate in Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, the pipeline had become a symbol of German softness toward Russia and its mercantilist instinct to put economic interests first.
Now, he had killed it.
“The situation is today fundamentally changed,” Scholz said.
The same day, Germany signed off on a first package of sanctions with other members of the EU. The nearly 600 pages of penalties included travel bans and asset freezes aimed at people in Putin’s inner circle.
In Britain, where Russian oligarchs have burrowed deep into the political and commercial establishment, Prime Minister Boris Johnson imposed travel bans on three wealthy Russians and said any British assets they held in the country would be frozen.
European officials made clear that sanctions could be ratcheted up if Putin made further incursions into Ukraine. But Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, lobbied for targeting Russia’s central bank and excluding some Russian banks from SWIFT, an international messaging system for cross-border financial transactions. At this point, though, the chancellor was still resisting.
Still, in halting Nord Stream 2, a major German taboo had fallen. Mothballing the pipeline has already reopened an anguished debate over the country’s energy policy, with some urging a delay in shuttering the country’s last few nuclear power plants and Scholz announcing plans to speed up the construction of two LNG terminals to reduce Germany’s dependence on Russian gas.
More than any other factor, perhaps, Germany’s sudden reversal from equivocation to robust involvement in Western deterrence signaled the united front that Putin would face if he invaded.
And then the war started.
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A Halting Path to Sanctions
When Putin went on television in the early hours of Feb. 24 to announce that he had ordered a “special military operation” in Ukraine — avoiding the word “war” — the sound of explosions and air-raid sirens erupted almost immediately in Kyiv and other cities.
Until that moment, said Karen Pierce, the British ambassador to the U.S., “I don’t think everyone in Europe and around the world expected it to be full-blown. That was the moment that jolted everyone.”
The EU’s belated recognition was evident in the initially plodding negotiations over sanctions. A decade of crises — from eurozone debt problems to Brexit and the pandemic — had created an almost ritualistic pursuit of self-interest when it came to hammering out Europe-wide policy in Brussels.
Europeans were similarly reluctant about shipping lethal weapons to the Ukrainian army, even those categorized as defensive. Fearing a backlash at home, Germany and its neighbors limited themselves to sending protective gear like helmets or flak jackets.
But their resolve quickly stiffened with the start of the war. Shortly before Germany, the Netherlands offered Ukraine Stinger missiles and other weapons. On March 26, the EU set up a nearly $500 million fund for members to send weapons. It was the first time the bloc jointly purchased lethal weapons to arm another country’s army under the EU banner — another Rubicon crossed.
Countries that are geographically closer to Russia, like Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as the Netherlands — backed by the U.S. and Canada — pressed for a single huge set of sanctions that would genuinely hurt Putin, according to European officials who took part in the talks.
In particular, these countries were pushing for personally penalizing Putin and his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and suspending Russian banks from SWIFT. But SWIFT was still a no go for the Germans, several officials said.
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A ‘Quantum Leap’ in Financial Penalties
It was before dinner Feb. 24, on the evening after the invasion began, when Zelenskyy’s image flickered on a video screen. European leaders were meeting under the highest level of secrecy, without advisers or electronic devices. Clad in suits and ties, they were seated in the comfort of a high-tech conference room in Brussels. Zelenskyy appeared to be in a bunker, somewhere in Kyiv, wearing his now-famous military-green T-shirt. The contrast was not lost on anyone in the room.
“This may be the last time you see me alive,” Zelenskyy said in making yet another fervent plea for tougher sanctions and more weapons.
When the leaders emerged from the room, they were visibly shaken, several officials said. Some described Zelenskyy’s appearance as a “catalyst” and a “game changer.” Later that night and the next morning, they instructed their envoys in Brussels to freeze the assets of Putin and Lavrov, and to finally greenlight the severing of many Russian banks from the SWIFT platform.
“It’s a quantum leap,” said Rosa Balfour, the director of Carnegie Europe. “Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has brought Europeans together on what probably has been the single most divisive foreign-policy issue since the start of the European Union.”
Like Germany’s shuttering of the Nord Stream project, the action on SWIFT took Western penalties to an entirely new level.
In the US, an Evolution on Ukraine
The annexation of Crimea hung over U.S. officials. Over breakfast at the security conference in Munich, Secretary of State Antony Blinken vividly recalled the mistakes made in 2014, when Western allies were taken by surprise by Russia’s lightning conquest. It took them nearly a year to cobble together sanctions, none of which were severe enough to force Putin to reverse himself.
U.S. diplomats had held hundreds of meetings with European officials since Russia began massing troops in the fall. In a striking break from practice, the CIA disclosed detailed intelligence about Putin’s war plans, including so-called false-flag operations that Russia could use as a pretext to strike.
Hours after the Russians attacked on Feb. 24, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called his Ukrainian counterpart, Oleksii Reznikov, to reassure him that the United States’ support for Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity was “unwavering.”
The next day, the White House approved another $350 million package of weapons and equipment for Ukraine that Pentagon officials said began flowing within days — lightning speed, as arms shipments go.
‘What Are We Prepared to Do?’
Ten days after a desperate Zelenskyy asked the world what it was waiting for, the world responded on a global scale and with dizzying speed. In gestures small and not so small, individuals and institutions stood up to Russia’s aggression and expressed solidarity with Ukraine.
In the process, NATO has been revitalized, the U.S. has reclaimed a mantle of leadership that some feared had vanished in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the EU has found a unity and purpose that eluded it for most of its existence.
“The question to which European leaders don’t yet have an answer,” said Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford University, “is, ‘What are we prepared to do for Ukraine in the long term?’”
As Putin presses his lethal military advance, the unthinkable has already happened. Now it gives way to the unknowable.
