The End of Appeasement: What Ukraine Taught the West About Power

For thirty years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe lived in a state of strategic sedation. War was something that happened elsewhere. Diplomacy was an exercise in values. Security was outsourced to institutions, and economics replaced force as the assumed engine of peace. Beneath it all lay a quietly shared illusion: that appeasement, under the new name of engagement, had become a virtue.

Ukraine has destroyed that illusion.

Since 2014—but especially since the full-scale invasion of February 2022—Ukraine has exposed the hollowness of the post-Cold War European consensus. She has revealed that power still matters, that borders are not sacred, and that ideology—however masked in language—still drives war. And in doing so, Ukraine has begun to teach the West a painful but necessary lesson: that peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of deterrence.

Ukraine’s resistance has shattered the West’s appeasement paradigm, and the question therefore cries out as to why that rupture may be the most important geopolitical awakening of the 21st century.

Appeasement Rebranded: The Post-1991 Consensus

The West did not call it appeasement. It was called engagement, or dialogue, or strategic patience. The premise was simple: integrate Russia into the global economy, expose her to liberal norms, and eventually she would converge with the rules-based order. Trade would soften her posture. Treaties would anchor her behaviour. Energy interdependence, particularly between Germany and Russia, would tie the Kremlin’s fate to European stability.

This logic underpinned NATO’s hesitancy to expand eastward with full guarantees. It shaped the EU’s reluctance to antagonise Moscow. It explained the minimal response to Chechnya, to the invasion of Georgia in 2008, and even to the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

In truth, this was appeasement—only dressed in the finery of diplomacy. It ignored the nature of power, and worse, it misunderstood the intentions of an adversary who had never stopped regarding the collapse of the Soviet Union as a catastrophe for Russian imperialism.

Ukraine’s Awakening—and Europe’s

Ukraine was amongst the first to learn that engagement was not protection. In 1994 Kyiv gave up her nuclear weapons in exchange for security assurances under the Budapest Memorandum. Those assurances proved worthless when Russia invaded in 2014.

For a time, Ukraine herself flirted with appeasement. Political elites vacillated between Western integration and Eastern dependency. The 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2013–14 Euromaidan uprisings were more than democratic movements—they were rejections of a political culture of passivity. When Ukrainians overthrew Viktor Yanukovych, they were not merely turning West. They were abandoning the myth that compromise with autocracy could preserve freedom.

Since then Ukraine has done what much of the West feared to do: confront Russia directly. And in doing so, she has changed how Europe thinks about power.

The Limits of Soft Power

The European Union has long preferred the language of values over that of strength. Its greatest successes have come through attraction, not coercion: enlargement, trade deals, civil society assistance. But Ukraine has reminded Brussels—and Berlin—that soft power is not enough when confronted by hard violence.

Russia does not fear laws. She fears artillery. She does not respect dialogue. She respects deterrence.

The West’s slow pivot to this reality has been painful. Sanctions took months to calibrate. Arms deliveries were delayed. Red lines shifted. Yet slowly, and under pressure from Kyiv’s moral clarity, Europe began to rediscover the necessity of hard power.

The Baltic states led the way. Poland followed. France and Germany, however belatedly, have begun to rearm. Neutrality has collapsed in Finland and Sweden. A new understanding is taking root: that power is not antithetical to peace—it is its guarantor.

The American Relearning

The United States, too, entered the 21st century with illusions. After Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington became wary of entanglement, preferring offshore balancing to direct commitment. Barack Obama dismissed Russia as a “regional power”. Donald Trump flirted with deference to autocracy. Joe Biden began his presidency with a doctrine of restraint.

Ukraine challenged all of it. By resisting alone—then surviving, then pushing back—Ukraine forced the United States to choose: irrelevance or reengagement.

American support, when it came, was decisive but conditional. And yet, through Ukraine, Washington has rediscovered the logic of alliances: that credibility, once forfeited, is hard to recover.

In this sense, Ukraine has not just taught Europe about power. She has reminded America why she once wielded it.

The Price of Delay

Every moment of appeasement has had a cost.

• In 2008, failure to respond meaningfully to the invasion of Georgia emboldened Moscow.

  
  

• In 2014, the half-measure sanctions after Crimea’s annexation and the Russian-backed "peoples' revolutions" in Donetsk and Luhansk legitimised faits accomplis.

  
  

• In 2021, the ambiguous messaging from Western capitals on NATO’s open-door policy likely encouraged escalation.

By 2022, when Russia launched her full-scale invasion, she did so convinced that the West would blink. She had reason to believe so. For years, the West had blinked.

It was only when Ukraine refused to blink—when she stood alone, for days, for weeks, for years—that the West began to reconsider her posture. But the delay has been costly. Thousands of lives. Dozens of towns destroyed. A continent destabilised. A global economy rocked.

Appeasement does not prevent war. It delays its recognition.

Ukraine’s Doctrine of Strength

Ukraine’s strategic culture, born in fire, is now based on a simple premise: deterrence through resilience. Her doctrine is not to avoid confrontation, but to survive it. Not to defuse aggression, but to render it ineffective.

This approach has transformed Ukraine from a peripheral state into Europe’s military innovator. Her drone fleets, defensive fortifications and decentralised command structures have become models for NATO allies. Her mobilisation of society—through volunteer battalions, civilian technology communities and information warfare—has shown that a small nation, properly armed and determined, can hold back a superpower.

Ukraine’s lesson is stark but empowering: weakness invites war. Strength, even when fragile, invites survival.

The New European Moment

We live now in the aftermath of appeasement. Europe has reawakened. Borders are no longer theoretical. Power is no longer taboo. The idea that peace can be negotiated with tyranny has given way to the realisation that peace must be defended against it.

Ukraine did not ask to be the teacher. But through her blood and defiance, she has become one. She has reminded the West what power means—not domination, but defence; not conquest, but courage.

The age of illusions is over. The age of clarity has begun.