A Question of Life and Death: The Future of Ukraine, Poland and Germany - Instytut Pileckiego

Join us, together with an excellent line-up - Roderich Kiesewetter, Daniel Szeligowski, the Pilecki Institute´s Dominika Uczkiewicz, Patrycja Grzebyk and Eva Yakubovska - for our remembrance event marking 24 February 2022

Join us, together with an excellent line-up - Roderich Kiesewetter, Daniel Szeligowski, the Pilecki Institute´s Dominika Uczkiewicz, Patrycja Grzebyk and Eva Yakubovska - for our remembrance event marking 24 February 2022:

“A Question of Life and Death: The Future of Ukraine, Poland and Germany”

4 March at 18:30 | Pariser Platz 4A, 10117 Berlin Registration: https://forms.gle/gA7PX168YsQ379Wx9

This event is dedicated to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who are defending “their freedom and ours”: the European security order, the last remnants of a rules-based international system, other nations fighting worldwide for their independence and democracy in the face of potential imperial and fascist aggression. Ukraine’s resistance has already disproven what may have been the biggest fake news headline of the century: “Kyiv will fall in a few days.” Let’s look at popular headlines today: “Ukraine makes the fastest battlefield gain in 2.5 years,” reads one of them. 

And yet admiration, as justified as it is, contains its own trap. Saying that “Ukrainians are invincible,” even in the face of Russian bombardment-induced ice-cold winters, risks becoming a low-cost, self-comforting assertion. The responsibility of Ukraine’s allies has not become less urgent, quite the opposite.

A Question of Life and Death...”- this is not a deliberately shocking wake-up call, a promotional teaser or a tabloid exaggeration. If anything, it is a sober, down-to-earth assessment of reality.

Europe has yet to swallow an even larger red pill. But will it be able to do so?

Confronting Russia’s war of aggression in the context of a geopolitically reoriented United States and an increasingly strained transatlantic relationship makes this task all the more difficult. The psychologist Leon Festinger, who coined the concept of cognitive dissonance, argued that updating beliefs and revising one’s self-concept are necessary final steps in fully integrating a new truth. We, Europe, the West, whatever remains of it, have come far, but perhaps not far enough to fully accept that Europe must stand its ground, and that Russia’s genocidal war of aggression is directed against Europe and the whole free world.