Putin Against 1648

The Peace of Westphalia had banished from Europe the pretension of an empire to erase its neighbour. It is this grammar, four centuries old, that the Russian invasion has set out to trample.

The Empire is bogging down. Four years for a “three-day operation.” Up to twenty-five thousand Russian soldiers killed each month, according to NATO. Refineries ablaze as far as Tatarstan. A fleet hiding far from Sevastopol. Bridges cut in Crimea. Such is the true state of the colossus.

The historical rhyme comes to us from the Thirty Years’ War, which bled Europe from 1618 to 1648. If the nuclear weapon forbids any exact tracing, the mechanism, for its part, is starting up again.

Westphalia, or the End of Empires

1648. Westphalia was not a peace, but a birth. Emerging from thirty years of carnage, Europe forged a grammar we still speak today.

A state is master in its own house. None shall meddle in the affairs of others. The weak and the strong are equal in law. A border is not redrawn to suit the appetite of the strongest.

Westphalia was the defeat of a dream. The dream of Ferdinand II of Habsburg, who wanted a unified, subjugated Empire, where peoples would be no more than provinces ruled from Vienna.

1620. At White Mountain, near Prague, his army crushes the Czech rebels. The following year, he has the scaffolds raised on the main square to behead twenty-seven of their leaders. He seizes Bohemia, that kingdom of ancient liberties. One does not negotiate with a province. One punishes it.

Yet that imperial dream was buried. With it died the dream of welding hundreds of German principalities into a single empire held in a single hand: his own. In 1648, their fragmentation, until then merely tolerated, became a right: each state was granted the power to govern itself. He who dreamed of devouring peoples watched them be reborn. Empires pass; sovereignties remain.

The Imperial Denial

February 2022. The old logic resurfaces, intact. Putin does not invade Ukraine in the name of an idea, but in the name of a denial. Russians and Ukrainians, he says, are one people, the same nation. Translation: Ukraine does not exist, and Kyiv is not a neighbour but a province in flight. Putin is still in 1618. The rest of the world judges him from 1648.

To this denial, Zelensky opposed a blade: if we were one people, it would be a blue-and-yellow flag flying over the Kremlin. For here lies the blindness of every empire: those it claims to erase refuse to die.

A word, now, on “realism.” Those who preach an arrangement with Moscow wrap themselves in it, and call idealists those who defend a principle. History says the opposite. The coldest of calculators, Richelieu, who taught that whoever holds force often holds the right, in matters of state, did not spare the hegemonic empire. He brought it down. A cardinal, he armed the Protestants against the Habsburgs. Out of cold calculation.

To defend Ukraine, then, is not a weakness of the soul. It is the hardest calculation of all, for an empire allowed to take one province never stops at the first. The naive one is not he who resists: it is he who believes he can buy an empire’s peace by handing it a people.

The Price of the Long War

There remains the most stubborn illusion, which sees Westphalia as a masterpiece of negotiation. These treaties were signed only because neither camp could prevail any longer. They negotiated for years while the cannon still thundered. They talked and they killed in the same breath.

The lesson is harsh for those who call for a truce: a silence of arms obtained before the aggressor knows himself defeated is not a peace. Merely a respite that arms the next war. Hence Putin’s wager today — a ceasefire that freezes his conquests and returns to him time, his last weapon.

Thirty years of war, a third of a people destroyed — is this what we promise Ukraine? It is not resistance that makes these wars last. It is the aggressor’s refusal to give up. Duration is not the price of a people’s courage, but of an empire’s pride.

And that price, we know who pays it. Neither the princes, nor the high commands. The civilians. Seventeenth-century Germany lost a third of its own, less to blows than to the famine and plague that every war drags in its wake. Magdeburg burned, and its name made a century tremble. Ukraine adds its own names to the list: Mariupol, Bucha, Bakhmut. The buffer land always pays for the pride of empires.

History promises nothing. It holds up a mirror. In it we see an empire sure of its right, a people that refuses to vanish, the dead piling up while we negotiate. In it we also see a glimmer. In 1648, the Empire did not prevail. There remained this bare rule: no one has the right to erase his neighbour.

Four centuries on, it is that rule we defend in the mud of the Donbas. It remains to be seen whether we still believe it true.

One people already knows it, dying to teach it to us.