How Putin made the EU great again

Vladimir Putin just achieved the impossible: genuine European unity. 

The Russian president’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has united Europe and the transatlantic sphere like nothing since the fall of the Berlin Wall, as even his erstwhile allies on the Continent abandoned him over the weekend.

From Sofia to Stockholm, Europe’s internal divisions over how to react to Putin’s aggression have melted away in recent days as the historic dimensions of the invasion — the greatest challenge to the West’s security architecture in decades — sank in. 

As images of Russian tanks rolling over the Ukrainian border and families huddled in subway stations filled the airwaves, concerns in national capitals about the local impact of tougher measures, such as barring Russian banks from SWIFT (a linchpin of the global interbank payment infrastructure), gave way to a shared resolve to do whatever it takes to halt Putin in his tracks. …

The most dramatic shift, however, occurred in Germany, a country whose leaders pursued fruitless “dialogue” with Putin for years, despite loud warnings from allies who insisted he couldn’t be trusted. 

Following Germany’s decision to indefinitely suspend the operation of the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Berlin buckled to pressure from allies and agreed to take a tougher stance toward Russia across the board. 

On Saturday, Germany dropped its resistance to suspending Russia from SWIFT and announced that it was also giving up its longstanding refusal to send arms to Ukraine. 

On Sunday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, marking nothing less than the most dramatic political shift in modern German history, outlined a sweeping reversal of the country’s position on defense spending with the announcement of a €100 billion fund for new weaponry that he said would enable Berlin to fulfill its NATO spending commitments over the long term. 

After years of dragging its feet on defense spending, Berlin committed to even go beyond what its allies were asking when it came to investing in the Bundeswehr, the German army.

During a special session of the German parliament, Scholz, a politician not known for hyperbole, left no question about the gravity of the events that prompted the shift, calling the Russian invasion “a turning point in the history of our Continent.”