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

Dear all,

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/4WCt8Ex4aVDJAqdi6

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...” 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.

Helping us navigate these questions are the members of our panel: one of the sharpest and boldest minds in German politics, Roderich Kiesewetter; one of Poland’s leading analysts on Ukraine, Daniel Szeligowski; and the Pilecki Institute’s distinguished representatives: Dominika Uczkiewicz, a lawyer and historian specializing in transitional justice, legal history, and German–Polish relations; Patrycja Grzebyk, professor of international law at the University of Warsaw, OSCE Expert and affiliated with the Centre for Research on Totalitarianisms at the Pilecki Institute, who has advised Polish government institutions; and Eva Yakubovska, an Ukrainian expert, project coordinator, and curator of the first international Stus exhibition at the Pilecki Institute in Berlin. 

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.

This urgency compels us to examine the past, the present and the likely future as a dialectical unity — including the history of the war, Ukraine’s brave fight, its neighbours’ role therein and the normative dimensions rooted in international law. Our very notions, and even the language of moral indignation, are themselves products of a specific historical moment: the post-war effort to build a world that would never again allow genocide and wars of aggression, as the American foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan has documented in his work.

Among those who shaped this framework were the Polish-born jurist Hersch Lauterpacht and the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, the latter having coined the term genocide and having become the driving force behind the adoption of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Yet Polish contributions to the normative foundations of international politics and law go much deeper. Poland was one of the key contributors to the United Nations War Crimes Commission, founded in 1943 by seventeen Allied states. It was the principal international body during the war that coordinated national investigations, collected evidence, and prepared the legal groundwork for the prosecution of German Nazi crimes. In doing so, it helped shape the evidentiary and legal foundations that later informed the London Charter and the Nuremberg Trials.

This tradition of documentation and accountability was also embodied in the Polish Underground State, which gathered evidence of German Nazi crimes, including the reports of Witold Pilecki from inside Auschwitz. Justice begins with documentation. The Pilecki Institute’s Dominika Uczkiewicz and Patrycja Grzebyk will therefore present their Routledge volume on international law, now available via open access, which originated as a follow-up to the joint Pilecki Institute and Zentrum Liberale Moderne conference held in February 2023. 

The war must be fought and won; future agreements must be formulated and implemented. Yet any truly preventive countermeasures will require not only force, but also transitional justice. History teaches that unpunished crimes tend to repeat themselves.

Daniel Szeligowski, one of Poland’s foremost experts on Ukraine, served as a consultant to the Polish negotiating team during the now (in)famous Istanbul talks of March 2022. He has contributed to a special report addressing a key gap in public discourse: “Defining Ukraine’s Victory” He will also discuss the extraordinary efforts of the Polish state and civil society in 2022–2023 - efforts without which, according to some experts, Ukraine’s struggle for freedom might have taken a very different course during those decisive months. Szeligowski was also among those who helped prepare a Polish governmental report documenting those aid efforts - not only to research and document the past, but to draw lessons for the future. 

Daniel Szeligowski is very active on his X account, where he pushes back against Russian disinformation, regularly debunking misleading narratives and exposing information warfare aimed at shaping Polish public debate. At the same time, he consistently argues that Ukraine’s allies should provide more decisive and sustained support.

Germany’s shift - from a country whose energy dependence and appeasement policies under successive governments helped enable Russia’s full-scale war to one of Ukraine’s key allies - is testimony to the Popperian self-corrective power of liberal democracies. Roderich Kiesewetter has been one of the key voices shaping this new geopolitical orientation and learning process. Yet in his upcoming book, which will be available for purchase and signing at the event, he expresses stark discontent with the status quo, asking:

“Will we become a self-determining geopolitical actor — or surrender our future to others?”

He regularly criticizes successive German governments across party lines and the West more broadly for unfulfilled promises, including the failure to deliver Taurus missiles, and for what he considers half-baked efforts.

Eva Yakubovska ®T.Koester-GHH

Eva Yakubovska will moderate the event. As a founding member of Vitsche and curator at the Pilecki Institute, she will also share her observations from the past three years and her reflections on what lies ahead. While working on the first international exhibition about the Ukrainian poet and freedom fighter Vasyl Stus, currently on display in Düsseldorf and receiving international acclaim, she drew from his life an insight that feels especially urgent today: it is not that Ukraine, Poland and Germany have the option to cooperate. They have no alternative. Helping Ukraine is not merely solidarity or an act in the name of noble ideals. It is, quite simply, enlightened self-interest.

“Welcome to the desert of the real” as The Matrix has it, is uttered after Neo takes the red pill and awakens from a simulated reality. The Slovenian philosophers Slavoj Žižek later used the phrase to describe the collapse of Western illusions after 11 September 2001, when a comfortable belief in the “end of history” gave way to the return of geopolitical violence

Europe has yet to swallow an even larger red pill, one arguably far greater in scope and scale. But will it be able to do so?

Panelists:

Roderich Kiesewetter
Roderich Kiesewetter is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and a member of the Bundestag since 2009. A former Bundeswehr officer, he serves as a foreign and security policy expert within the CDU/CSU parliamentary group and has been an outspoken advocate of stronger European defence cooperation and sustained support for Ukraine.

Daniel Szeligowski
Daniel Szeligowski is a Polish foreign policy analyst specializing in Eastern Europe and EU–Ukraine relations. He is affiliated with the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM), where his research focuses on Ukrainian domestic politics, regional security, and the geopolitical dynamics of the post-Soviet space.

Dominika Uczkiewicz
Dominika Uczkiewicz is a lawyer and historian specializing in transitional justice, legal history, and German–Polish relations. Her research focuses on the history of international criminal law and the war crimes trials following the Second World War. She was a researcher at the Willy Brandt Centre for German and European Studies at the University of Wrocław during her doctoral studies and is currently an assistant professor at the Centre for Research on Totalitarianisms at the Pilecki Institute in Warsaw.

Patrycja Grzebyk
Patrycja Grzebyk is a professor of international law at the University of Warsaw and is affiliated with the Centre for Research on Totalitarianisms at the Pilecki Institute. She specializes in international humanitarian and criminal law, is a recipient of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs award for her research on Poland’s contributions to criminal law (1918–2018), and serves as an expert for the OSCE.

Eva Yakubovska (Moderator)
Eva Yakubovska is a Ukrainian curator, founding member of Vitsche Berlin, and project coordinator at the Pilecki Institute. She curated the first international exhibition on Vasyl Stus, and her work focuses on Eastern European memory politics, intellectual history, and cross-border cultural dialogue between Ukraine, Poland, and Germany.