Europe’s ‘Never Again’ Has an Expiration Date — Apparently, It’s Now

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We are now living a historical déjà vu — one that we clearly see, yet Europe stubbornly refuses to acknowledge. What’s happening around Ukraine bears too strong a resemblance to the late 1930s, when the civilized world already stood with one foot over the abyss — and still convinced itself that Hitler “could be negotiated with,” that he was a “rational actor,” not a man who treated the map of Europe as a playground for experiments in aggression.

Then, Czechoslovakia was the bargaining chip; today, it is Ukraine. The only difference is that there were no nuclear warheads then, and now there are, while no one is soberly calculating the cost of a mistake.

In Munich in 1938, Hitler received exactly what he wanted: not only the Sudetenland, not merely a territory with mixed population and industry, but, above all, confirmation that the West was prepared to trade its allies for the illusion of peace. Czechoslovakia wasn’t even invited to the table — just as no one today intends to ask Ukraine whether it accepts a “peace plan” that envisions a permanent Russian military presence in the occupied territories and a frozen mine laid beneath any future.

Back then, Chamberlain returned to London with a piece of paper bearing Hitler’s signature and the phrase, “I have brought you peace for our time.” Today, the same Munich undertones can be heard in calls for “stable relations with Russia,” “the need to avoid escalation,” and “the resumption of dialogue with Moscow” — once again at someone else’s expense, never at the expense of those reciting these comforting formulas.

Europe loves to repeat the mantra “never again,” but it invests the phrase with a meaning convenient for itself: never again a major war on its territory. Not “never again appeasing a dictator,” not “never again abandoning allies,” not “never again trading away principles.” And so, any attempt to call Russia what it is — an aggressive empire with a programme to destroy a neighbouring state — is dismissed as dangerous candour that might “provoke a Third World War.” Meanwhile, any talk of compromise at Ukraine’s expense is presented as prudence and responsibility.

In 1938, Hitler was also supposedly afraid to “go too far.” The Sudetenland was handed to him in the name of preserving peace. Within a year, he had already carved up Poland, and two years later, he was bombing London. Today, the same fear of a major conflict is pushing some European elites toward the idea that “a limited defeat of Ukraine is better than the risk of confrontation with Russia.” It is the same logic — only instead of black-and-white newsreels, we now have polished studios, round tables, and “expert discussions.”

Interwar Czechoslovakia was not “a small problem on the periphery,” but one of the most developed democracies in Central Europe, with an industrial base that outmatched many European peers, a vibrant cultural life, and its own political tradition. It was not surrendered because it was weak, but because the strong chose to abdicate responsibility and buy time.

Today, Ukraine is not “a poor post-Soviet state,” but the frontier between two civilizational models — a country that, with its flesh, blood, and shattered cities, is holding back an army that would otherwise already be standing in Warsaw, Riga, or Chișinău. Yet to some in Europe’s political establishment, Ukraine appears just as Czechoslovakia once did: a convenient platform for a grand geopolitical bargain, a tidy landfill for other nations’ fears and political cowardice.

The central delusion of both 1938 and the 2020s is the same: presenting the aggressor as a rational actor operating within limits he has never set for himself. Hitler spoke of “correcting the injustices of Versailles,” “protecting the German minority,” and “historical restitution.” Until the very end, many pretended his objectives were a handful of provinces, a few “disputed territories” — despite his own writings stating, in plain language, his plans for Lebensraum, the destruction of states, and the restructuring of Europe.

Today, Putin is reduced to similarly convenient formulas: he “needs to save face,” “wants security guarantees,” “fears NATO.” This, despite a decade of open statements from his own elite that Ukraine is “anti-Russia” and must be decolonized, denazified, and depopulated — that a Ukrainian state within its current borders is, for them, an intolerable fact. Europe reads these texts just as it once read Mein Kampf: as something extreme, but not necessarily programmatic — rhetoric that can supposedly be softened, managed, or neutralized by diplomacy.

The difference between us and Czechoslovakia is that we have already been sacrificed once, in 2014. Crimea and part of Donbas became our own “Sudeten Package”: the world muttered something about sanctions, but the real conclusion was simple — the main thing is to avoid a big war. Hybrid mobilization then halted the creeping surrender, but in parallel, the same exclusionary mechanisms began to take effect: Russia quietly reverted to the status of a “problematic partner” with whom one could still trade, build Nord Stream, and maintain business as usual.

“All these years, Europe viewed Ukraine as an internal inconvenience — a low-intensity conflict that ‘had to be resolved somehow,’ without acknowledging the central truth: it was already a war of annihilation, only in slow motion. On February 24, 2022, that illusion exploded in full.”

Now that the myth of a “peaceful Russia that was merely not heard” has collapsed, it has been replaced by another illusion — that the war can be stopped midway. That the occupation can be consolidated under the pleasant label of “compromise”; that mass deportations, filtration camps, and killings can be quietly ignored; that all of this can be wrapped in phrases about “difficult but necessary decisions.”

This is, in fact, the new Munich formula — only without a printed paper carrying a dictator’s signature, because today all it takes is a briefing statement and a convenient leak to the press about the “readiness of the parties for dialogue.” At least, Czechoslovakia was told honestly: we will not defend you. We, on the other hand, are offered a scheme in which we are supported formally but, in reality, are being prepared to accept defeat as “the least bad option.”

Why is Europe stepping on the same rake? Because its political class grew up in a world where war was theoretical, and comfort was real. They know history perfectly well, but treat it like a museum exhibit with a plaque reading “The Munich Agreement: a mistake that led to disaster,” rather than a manual of warnings written in blood.

They have turned “never again” into a moral mantra rather than a strategic imperative. They fear not so much Putin as the responsibility they would bear if we were to call things by their proper names: the world no longer lives in a “post-war Europe” order, but in a new pre-war reality, the full scale of which is not yet understood.

In this framework, Ukraine cannot play the role of Chamberlain’s piece of paper — something to be signed, waved, and forgotten. We cannot allow ourselves to become Czechoslovakia 2.0, no matter how many comforting statements and warm gestures we hear from European podiums. This means we must adopt a posture that Europe has long abandoned: to recognize that we are the main guarantor of our own sovereignty, not a passive pawn in some great balance-of-power exercise. Our task is not merely survival, but to shatter the very principle of Munich-style appeasement: to demonstrate that the aggressor is stopped not by pieces of paper or “peace formulas,” but by a price he is unwilling to pay.

This is a harsh and uncomfortable truth: the Western world does not want to learn history in real time; it wants to repeat it on someone else’s territory. But if we allow this to happen, there will be nowhere left to repeat it. After Ukraine, the next target will not be “another small country on the map” — it will be the European Union itself, tested on how much territory it is willing to cede for the sake of “stable relations” with revanchist regimes.

Therefore, the question today is simpler and sharper than Brussels likes to admit: either we break the Munich logic of the 21st century here, on the Ukrainian front, or history will cease to be a textbook and become a sentence for all of Europe. Then the phrase “it’s already happened” will be uttered for the last time — with no chance to undo it.

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