It’s worth noting that the term “war of annihilation” is typically used to describe wars in which the goal is to exterminate large parts of the enemy population, the German Eastern Front in the Second World War being a very notable case that is often described that way.
This is the sort of statement that would fit well into a speech or article by American or European hawks who want to emphasize the threat of Russia. It’s a nice applause line for a receptive audience.
Yet such rhetoric needs to be grounded in the geopolitical realities. Grassman’s comment itself would mean on its face that unless Europe (presumably meaning mainly Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland) stops the Russia-Ukraine War, that liberal democracies in Europe will collapse into, well, apparently something not liberal and not democratic.
We could characterize that as well as an argument that if Russia defeats Ukraine – or takes over the whole country? – that the entire current political orders in the EU countries will collapse. How? By Russia invading and occupying the whole continent? By the populations of Europe being so distraught that Ukraine has not been pushed completely out of Ukraine’s legal territory that they all right up and set up, what, Orbánist or Trumpist regimes?
The article is sprinkled with odd statements. Grassman writes that the war “did not first begin with the full invasion of 2022, but rather in 2014; it was long prepared for and was denied for many years by Russia.” Four and a half years into the war, is anybody who has been paying more than casual attention to the news about it surprised to learn that Russia illegally seized the province/oblast of Crimea in 2014 after the fall of the pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych as a result of the Euromaidan protests? Russia also didn’t deny seizing Crimea. They openly declared they had taken it over as part of Russia and intended to keep it.
At the same time, they supported irregular fighters in eastern Ukrainian provinces who presented themselves as local nationalists, but Russia also began annexing and ruling parts of that territory. That relatively low-level but real military conflict continued until the “full invasion’” in 2022. Aside from descriptions that use the Russian propaganda names for occupied territories as part of Russia, none of that is new or surprising to anyone with minimal familiarity with the conflict.
Grassman’s pitch on its face is basically that European nations should go to war with Russia over Ukraine:
Russia's war is aimed at the whole of Europe – and has long since taken on a global dimension, also considering North Korea's military involvement and China's political backing – but so far it has only been waged against Ukraine. Ukraine is fighting a threat that treats Europe primarily as a Ukrainian problem. The European policy of denying Ukraine the weapons it needs and at the same time continuing to indirectly supply Russia with money and technology therefore not only betrays Ukraine, but also endangers Europe's security.This war is essentially a conventional war of attrition in which the lines of conflict have been more-or-less unchanged since 2023, when Ukraine’s army tried with limited success to roll back the Russian lines. Ukraine has made important advances in drone technology, which Grassman of course emphasizes. (Somehow Grassman manages to read that fact as showing the “half-heartedness” of other Europeans nations!) But it hasn’t changed the essentially frozen front lines. Doing so on either side would require acceptance of huge losses of soldiers, even more so than the ones currently taking place. And Russia, despite all the hype we hear from the less critical war boosters in the West, has a substantial advantage over Ukraine in manpower and economic strength.
Until both sides decide they have less to win than to lose from continuing the war, it can be expected to go on.
Yes, Ukraine is fighting back impressively. Russia might have drawn better lessons from the many wars in which countries push back hard and are not inclined to throw down their weapons when a hostile foreign invader crosses their borders. The US also could and should have learned the same lesson long ago. But neither did.
This line is one of those that makes me want to go, “huh?” “Individual attacks are currently being carried out [against Ukraine] with up to 1500 long-range drones and 50 ballistic missiles. What other European country could withstand such waves of attacks?” Britain and Germany come to mind, both of which suffered major bombing attacks for years during the Second World War. Do we really need to pretend that history began on the day the major February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine began?
And Grassman includes the seemingly obligatory references in pieces like this to Putin’s vague historical claims about what happened hundreds of years ago. And he includes details about various Russian abuses against the Ukrainian civilian population, many of which have been well documented.
But in the end, his article is basically a recitation of the general European public diplomatic position that Russia is big and scary, which it is. Consumers of articles like his should keep in mind that the notion of big, direct military intervention by other European armies into Ukraine to fight directly against Russia is just not realistic to expect at this point. Ukraine is not a NATO member. And it certainly part of Russia’s motive for invading was fear that Ukraine would become one – NATO officially stated in 2008 that Ukraine would become a member – that figured into their decision to first to seize Crimea, conduct low-level warfare in parts of the eastern provinces, and stage the full-blown invasion of 2022.
The European NATO members are now faced with building a new approach to defense against possible military threats from Russia. The expansion of NATO in the 1990s and 2000s was seen by both Democratic and Republican Administrations as basically “freebees,” i.e., Russia couldn’t and wouldn’t do anything to push back against it. Russia’s mini-war against Georgia in 2008 was their immediate answer to NATO’s declaration that both Ukraine and Georgia would become members of the alliance. But that meant that what looked like freebees, including adding former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which have since been points of potential conflict that would require direct military responses by NATO members.
And starting with the Trump 2.0 regime in 2025, the European allies now recognize that they cannot count on the United States to engage in any military conflict against Russia, even if it involved clear aggression against the territory of NATO members. This is a huge adjustment, not least because not only are NATO’s weapons to a large extent American weapons, and the intelligence arrangements and the structures for joint NATO actions are also predicated on American leadership, equipment, and intelligence.
This is inevitably a messy process. It will involve NATO countries building up domestic defense industries – with all the real problems involved in that, including corruption and the use of overblown war warnings to justify the increased expenses. It also raises a key issue to new intensity. If the rearmament means cuts to civilian services, that will make the process much less popular, even if the “military Keynesianism” of rearmament and expanding domestic arms industries do generate economic growth. It also in practice makes the conservative-leaning austerity economics which still plagues the EU even more of a problem. The obvious main solution – requiring billionaires to pay higher taxes – is heresy to the austerity economics so successfully championed by Germany’s Angela Merkel during the euro and debt crises of the last two decades.
Looking actively for wars to fight, like the United States did from the Korean War to the US-Israel War on Iran, will not make matters better. The above-mentioned nations of Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland are the countries with the biggest armies in the EU-plus-Britain and so they will play critical roles. When we think back to the aftermath of the Second World War on some of the foreign policy decision Britain and France have made in their foreign policy – France’s Vietnam and Algerian Wars and the Suez crisis of 1956 that became a body blow to the influence of Britain and France in the Middle East to name just three examples – the EU publics need to keep in mind what kind of messes that imperial arrogance and irresponsible war-mongering can do a lot of substantive damage to their own well-being.
This is a messy process that has just begun. And since, as James Madison famously observed, earthly governments are not run by angels, we can’t count on all those decisions over the next couple of decades being optimal ones. That’s why citizens of Europe and Russia – Russia is also partly European, of course – need to insist that their governments put at least as much emphasis on building international structures of peace as they do to planning and arming for wars.
An end to the current Russia-Ukraine War that would be constructive and realistic enough to last for a while is currently the most obvious step in that direction.
But the US isn’t going to fade away out of European politics any time soon, even if the US itself were to formally leave NATO. And we are currently seeing with both the Russia-Ukraine War and the US-Israel War on Iran that having a US President who is not only in visibly poor health, notably including his cognitive abilities and his general lack of any strategic vision in foreign policy beyond enriching himself, his family, and their assorted cronies, is unlikely to result in stable peace agreements for those two wars.
Notes:
(1) Grassman, Timm (2026): Die Fehler von gestern, die Drohnen von heute. Blätter 2026-10, 109-116. My translation to English.
(2) Putin in War Mode: Escalation on All Fronts? DW News YouTube channel 10/01/2026. <https://youtu.be/o8cubEmu5pI?si=-brkVTgEZfCYL_-t> (Accessed: 2026-02-10).
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