The Kremlin’s decision to attack Ukraine militarily destabilizes the post-Cold War European order. By launching a major war in Europe for the first time in decades, Vladimir Putin is proving NATO and its supporters right, assures the Austrian daily The standard.
“He did it.” Vladimir Putin’s decision to “carry out his threats” this Thursday morning and“attack Ukraine militarily” leaves austrian newspaper The standard stunned. For the title on the left, the Russian president broke with “the peace that has reigned in Europe for several decades”. “And not only in the areas occupied by the Donbass separatists, but apparently also in Kiev, in Kharkiv, in Odessa, with rockets and cruise missiles.”
From Vienna, the daily considers that Russian military operations are damaging the balance of Europe as a whole. “All of a sudden, no one is safe anymore in the countries of the former Soviet Union,” he says. The post-Cold War configuration is broken. And with it, the period of peace that Europe has known since the end “of the last major European wars, in the former Yugoslavia”.
The concerns of the Baltic countries were well founded
For The standard, no matter the motives of the Kremlin. that he wishes “denazify and demilitarize Ukraine”as Vladimir Putin claimed, or whether this attack was launched to serve Russian interests, does not matter. “Putin’s actions and his increasingly aggressive and uninhibited rhetoric are retrospective proof that the rapprochement of Eastern Europeans and the Baltic countries towards NATO was well founded.”
NATO, of which Austria is not an integral part, “will not intervene militarily in Ukraine”, assures the Viennese newspaper. But the implementation of new sanctions once morest Russia is “inevitable”. “Prolonged fighting in Ukraine will cause enormous suffering and risk greatly destabilizing more or less neighboring countries, including Austria”, he analyzes. “Putin dealt a blow to the post-war order in Europe. Difficult times are ahead.”
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Liberal newspaper in the spirit of the French daily Releaseprinted on pink sheets, The standard practices a policy of lively and varied supplements. Since its launch on the Internet in February 1995, it has
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