On March 18, the airplane carrying the vice president of the United States landed in Vilnius. Joe Biden had flown into the Lithuania capital from Warsaw, where he had just held talks with the leaders of Poland and Estonia. The presidents of Lithuania and Latvia were waiting in Vilnius. One does not need to be an expert in international affairs to understand that Biden’s trip to Central and Northern Europe was prompted by Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine and the subsequent annexation of Crimea—a brutal breach of international law, unprecedented in modern-day Europe. Indeed, Europe had not experienced anything similar since the 1968 events in Czechoslovakia.
Of course, one should strive to maximize peace and order; however, this must be based on internationally recognized standards—not just those of one country. Russia has sought to justify its behavior as defending ethnic Russians. However, that begs the question—defending them against what? Against the way the people of independent Ukraine came out to the Maidan and exercised their sovereign rights to protect their democracy and freedom of choice in deciding how to shape their future? Or was the dismantling of the post–Cold War European order a deliberate step to restore the old European order of the twentieth century—the arrangement outlined in a speech on Vienna’s Heldenplatz 1938, in which the fates of individuals and states are determined by external geopolitical calculations and ethnic identity?
Source: nationalinterest.org
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