Special for the Yabloko web-site, 11.03.2023

Photo: Viktor Kogan-Yasny / Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

As is well known, there were wars in Europe after 1945: the territory of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, – and very tough confrontations on the verge of a large-scale use of force: the GDR in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968, – and violence against the backdrop of changes in the USSR: Lithuania and Latvia in 1991. But the “common place” in politics was that to move by sheer force was the last resort, that the results of competition and confrontation of the systems should be achieved mainly be means of “bypassing”, through strategic analysis and the use of “soft power”.

Victims, on any side, were the object of grief and regret, including speaking about the opposing side (where grief was often very formal, and did not change the social essence of the matter).

Now, for many reasons, it turned out that the strategic approach and soft power as a professional skill have been lost. Somewhere it happened on purpose, somewhere by incident, from laziness and relaxation.

A special new factor of military fans has emerged. And a largely abstract and indifferent attitude has formed towards victims and losses, decisions on this or that escalation are made with very little attention to the problem of victims and losses, the humanitarian complex, the problems of  human rights, the negligence of which can become irreversible.

I will also add here (although this will be an “attachment”, and I should have written about it separately)  that strategically stable solutions are virtually never achieved by frontal “sheer force” approaches, regardless of the nature and character of the confrontation, and victories of this kind turn out to be mostly provisional, creating by their nature prerequisites for the opposite development in the future.

VIKTOR KOGAN-YASNY

is an Advisor to the Chairman of the Federal Political Committee of the Yabloko party. Head of the public organisation “Regional Civil Initiative – the Right to Life and Civil Dignity”. Candidate of chemical sciences.