We cannot help but wonder in which century the former President of the Republic of Slovenia, Danilo Türk, is living. His recent statements given to the national media outlet, Radio-Television Slovenia (on Friday’s episode of the show Odmevi – Echoes), have shocked the Slovenian public. Türk is convinced that Ukraine has already lost the war, that it cannot set its own conditions and that it will have to accept what it is told to do.
“Terrible. A professor of international law explains that a state must accept the dictates of the aggressor. Has he not heard of the UN Charter before, even though he spent years as a guest at the United Nations? And will Slovenia also recognise Northern Cyprus? This confirms my thesis about the level of Slovenian international law doctrine,” wrote Pogačnik, an international lawyer, responding to former President Türk’s “theorising” that “Ukraine has already lost the war”.
The Putin regime’s narrative
With these words, he was, in fact, joining the narrative of the Putin regime, which seeks to overthrow the world order that was established after the two world wars. It is an order that was established after the world realised where changing borders with tanks and cannons was leading – to millions of innocent victims, widespread destruction, concentration camps, etc.
We must immediately reject such suggestions
The former state official subscribes to a mindset where there is room for territorially greedy military superpowers, and small countries like Slovenia fall prey to the appetites of these powerful neighbours. The thinking that the aggressor should be rewarded and the victim punished should be condemned fundamentally, as it could become the modus operandi of other predatory states with similar ambitions, as the current President of the Republic of Slovenia, Nataša Pirc Musar, has also stressed.
Trump did not speak of “surrender” but of the “status quo”
Pirc Musar did, of course, earn a rebuke from Richard Grenell, a US diplomat and Trump’s envoy for special missions, who reminded her that Slovenia’s contribution to the common defence is far from the promised two percent. This is the important message that was communicated between the lines at the US President Donald Trump‘s recent meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The USA signalled that it was time for Europe to play a more active role, that it was slowly heading to the Pacific and that it was time for a ceasefire. Nobody was talking about surrender, but about a truce, about some kind of status quo that would stop the bloodshed. President Trump has made it clear that Ukraine alone does not hold the right ‘cards’, but together with the US, it does.
The invasion is a capitulation to Russian interests
At the same time, it should be made clear that Ukraine did not lose the war. It has managed to defend most of its territory (with the help of its Western allies) and to safeguard its existence. And it is also a fact that Vladimir Putin has failed to win and to achieve most of his key strategic objectives, notably the indirect subjugation of the whole of Ukraine, including through the puppet government installed in Kyiv.
Russia has permanently lost most of Ukraine. If there were many ties of friendship and family between the two countries before the invasion, these have now been permanently severed for generations to come. It is also important to note that, as a consequence of the war, Sweden and Finland joined NATO, and we have also seen hundreds of thousands of casualties among Russian soldiers in exchange for relatively small territorial gains, a severely reduced Russian navy in the Black Sea, brain and labour drain, and severed ties with Europe. In addition, Russia is becoming a vassal of China (Moscow is increasingly dependent on Beijing). Putin’s invasion has proved to be, in one way or another, a capitulation of the interests of the ‘other military superpower’. All for the sake of one offended dictator who has not gotten over the collapse of the Soviet Union to this day.
Domen Mezeg
