Anders Fogh Rasmussen sees the Russian attack on Ukraine as the continuation of a war to which the world community has not reacted hard enough. As a lesson from history, the former NATO Secretary General is now calling for old mistakes not to be repeated.
Former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen sees the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a continuation of the occupation of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea. Seeing a nuclear power launch a full-scale invasion of a neighboring country was hard to believe, he said at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit of his Alliance of Democracies foundation. “Actually, we shouldn’t have been surprised,” he added.
The path taken by Russian President Vladimir Putin was never kept secret. This path became clear, among other things, in Putin’s speeches, in which he denied Ukraine’s right to exist, but also in the killing of dissidents and political opponents and above all in the Crimean invasion in 2014. “We mustn’t forget: That’s not a new war, it’s a continuation, an escalation of a war that started in 2014,” said the former Danish prime minister.
At that time one did not react strongly enough, he criticized. They kept buying Russian oil and gas, letting Russia host the Olympics and the World Cup, and allowing Putin to get away with it all. “We have not learned the lessons of history: appeasing dictators does not lead to peace. It leads to war and conflict.”
This year Putin thought he could get away with it again, said Fogh Rasmussen. However, he was wrong that Kyiv would fall without a fight. He didn’t expect the Ukrainians to fight courageously for their country. “Your fight is our fight,” he said to the applause of the audience. We are at a key moment for the free world, said Fogh Rasmussen. Ukraine must win the war. “The only way out for Putin is to get out of Ukraine,” he said. If the Russians stopped fighting, there would be no war – but if the Ukrainians did, there would be no Ukraine.
