By Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Huffington Post

European security today is facing its most serious challenge since the end of World War II. In essence, Russia’s open annexation of Crimea and its barely concealed annexation of part of Ukraine are marking the end of the post-World War II world order.

War cannot be a way of resolving territorial disputes in Europe. It is a matter of principle — not of the fairness of the situation.

The Russian government has once again opened up Pandora’s box and unleashed a threat that has already laid waste to the European continent many times before. Moreover, when it comes to the question of territorial claims, Russia is actually more vulnerable than other countries, not less.

The Kremlin leadership’s goal is far from geopolitical. It merely wants to return to a foreign policy comfort zone in which no external factors can be a threat to the regime’s existence.

The extent of the Kremlin regime’s hopes is a return to the Helsinki Accords, only without the third package concerning human rights. This is an attempt to affect an overhaul of European history not from the moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but 15 years further back — an attempt to make adjustments to the policy of “detente.” The Kremlin wants to return to the policy of peaceful coexistence with total non-interference in its “internal affairs.” It expects recognition of the Kremlin’s right to do anything it wants in what it considers to be its “zone of influence.”

As old-fashioned as this doctrine may seem, it represents a serious danger for Europe. Russia remains a country with a colossal military potential, sufficient to destroy all of humanity many times over. In case anybody has forgotten about this, the Kremlin is ready to remind us today. This huge military potential, which is doubtless going to continue to exist for a long time yet, has proven to be under the control of people with an extremely low level of political and moral accountability. A quick and easy way out of the situation that has emerged therefore does not exist.

Despite the obvious wrongfulness of the aggression perpetrated against Ukraine, Europe is going to have to look for a compromise in relations with the Kremlin regime because the alternative to compromise is global war. This is an objective reality that cannot simply be brushed aside. But, as a famous 20th century Russian political figure once said, there are compromises and then there are compromises. A policy of “appeasing the Kremlin” is a path that will lead to a big war far more quickly than it seems to many European politicians and businessmen who are disposed to conformism.

COUNTING ON THE DEMISE OF EUROPE

In the Kremlin and around the Kremlin today, there are more and more people who are candidly counting on a rapid “demise of Europe” in consequence of a full-scale political and economic crisis. They are seriously hoping that, for example, Great Britain’s withdrawal from the E.U. or the default of one of the Schengen Treaty countries will lead to the collapse of the eurozone and to the appearance in Europe of acute contradictions along North/South and East/West fault lines. In this case, every effort will be made to make sure that the dividing line of the political watershed will pass not along the course of the Northern Donets, but once again along the Vistula and the Oder.

The hawks in the Kremlin are not simply waiting for a crisis to happen in Europe. They are prepared to actively contribute to its appearance, notwithstanding even the fact that the new world global economic crisis would be deadly for the Russian economy. Nevertheless, there is a great likelihood that the Kremlin is going to be shaking Europe to the best of its abilities.

Strange as it may seem, inside-out Trotskyite ideas about permanent revolution are popular in Russia once again — only now with an ultra-right, nationalistic tinge. They dream of creating a new international ultra-right, which would unite all the reactionary and anti-liberal forces of Europe.

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