War in Europe is not a hysterical idea
By Anne Applebaum | Opinion Washington Post | August 29, 2014 |

Over and over again — throughout the entirety of my adult life, or so it feels — I have been shown Polish photographs from the beautiful summer of 1939: The children playing in the sunshine, the fashionable women on Krakow streets.

I have even seen a picture of a family wedding that took place in June 1939, in the garden of a Polish country house I now own. All of these pictures convey a sense of doom, for we know what happened next. September 1939 brought invasion from both east and west, occupation, chaos, destruction, genocide. Most of the people who attended that June wedding were soon dead or in exile. None of them ever returned to the house.

In retrospect, all of them now look naive. Instead of celebrating weddings, they should have dropped everything, mobilized, prepared for total war while it was still possible. And now I have to ask: Should Ukrainians, in the summer of 2014, do the same? Should central Europeans join them?

I realize that this question sounds hysterical, and foolishly apocalyptic, to U.S. or Western European readers. But hear me out, if only because this is a conversation many people in the eastern half of Europe are having right now.

Historical Novirossiya

In the past few days, Russian troops bearing the flag of a previously unknown country, Novorossiya, have marched across the border of southeastern Ukraine. The Russian Academy of Sciences recently announced it will publish a history of Novorossiya this autumn, presumably tracing its origins back to Catherine the Great. Various maps of Novorossiya are said to be circulating in Moscow. Some include Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk, cities that are still hundreds of miles away from the fighting. Some place Novorossiya along the coast, so that it connects Russia to Crimea and eventually to Transnistria, the Russian-occupied province of Moldova.

Putin and Limited Nuclear Strikes

A far more serious person, the dissident Russian analyst Andrei Piontkovsky, has recently published an article arguing, along lines that echo Zhirinovsky’s threats, that Putin really is weighing the possibility of limited nuclear strikes — perhaps against one of the Baltic capitals, perhaps a Polish city — to prove that NATO is a hollow, meaningless entity that won’t dare strike back for fear of a greater catastrophe. Indeed, in military exercises in 2009 and 2013, the Russian army openly “practiced” a nuclear attack on Warsaw.

Is all of this nothing more than the raving of lunatics? Maybe. And maybe Putin is too weak to do any of this, and maybe it’s just scare tactics, and maybe his oligarchs will stop him. But “Mein Kampf” also seemed hysterical to Western and German audiences in 1933. Stalin’s orders to “liquidate” whole classes and social groups within the Soviet Union would have seemed equally insane to us at the time, if we had been able to hear them.

But Stalin kept to his word and carried out the threats, not because he was crazy but because he followed his own logic to its ultimate conclusions with such intense dedication — and because nobody stopped him. Right now, nobody is able to stop Putin, either.  

    So is it hysterical to prepare for total war?
    Or is it naive not to do so?

Hillary Clinton compares Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine to Adolf Hitler’s in Nazi Germany

Russia Critics: ‘Europe In State of War’

Continued below the fold …

Lithuanian: Russia is in a ‘state of war against Europe’
Last updated Sat 30 Aug 2014 World

Russia is at war with Ukraine and so effectively at war with Europe, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite has said, calling on Europe to supply Kiev with military equipment.

    “It is the fact that Russia is in a war state against Ukraine. That means it is in a state of war against a country which would like to be closely integrated with the EU. Practically Russia is in a state of war against Europe. That means we need to help Ukraine to … defend its territory and its people and to help militarily, especially with the military materials to help Ukraine to defend itself because today Ukraine is fighting a war on behalf of all Europe.”

– President Dalia Grybauskaite  

Ukraine’s Poroshenko says close to point of all-out war with Russia
Reuters | Sat Aug 30, 2014 2:24pm EDT |

BRUSSELS – Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said he believed that efforts to halt violence with pro-Russian rebels were very close to a “point of no return” and that failure could lead to “full-scale war”.

“I think we are very close to the point of no return. The point of no return is full-scale war, which already happened on the territory controlled by separatists,” he told a news conference in Brussels after meeting EU leaders.

He added, however, that a trilateral meeting on Monday involving representatives of Kiev, Moscow and the European Union could produce a ceasefire.

Poroshenko was answering a question about an earlier comment he had made about the “point of no return.”