The tip of Europe as we all know it?

The struggle in Ukraine disrupts the post-Berlin Wall order in Europe: the tip of Scandinavian neutrality and equidistance, struggle recollections and discipline selections within the Balkans and the acceleration of European Union enlargement in Japanese Europe. What influence and penalties the struggle has on the residents of a Europe which has modified its face maybe perpetually.

We have been discussing it throughout a panel collectively organised with Debates on Europe on the Lectorinfabula worldwide cultural competition, which was held in Conversano (Southern Italy) finish of September. The audio system have been Kateryna Mishchenko, author and writer (Ukraine); Faruk Šehić, writer and poet (Bosnia and Herzegovina); Maarja Kangro, fiction and non-fiction author (Estonia) and Carl Henrik Fredriksson, programme Director of Debates on Europe (Sweden, Austria). It was moderated by Serbian-Italian journalist Marina Lalovic.

“Listening to Putin was like getting right into a time machine,” mentioned Faruk Šehić recounting the déjà vu he had within the days earlier than Russia’s assault on Ukraine in February. The identical mechanisms that marked the struggle within the Balkans within the Nineteen Nineties are at play at the moment, he famous. And what occurred ought to have come as no shock; the speech held by Vladimir Putin simply earlier than the invasion was mainly the identical as these by Radovan Karadžić again in 1992: Bosnia shouldn’t be an actual nation and should not exist, Bosnian Muslims make up a pretend nation, and so forth. If Russia will win the struggle in Ukraine, open battle will instantly flare up in Bosnia”, Šehić warned. “And that struggle in Bosnia, is not going to keep solely there. It is like opening Pandora’s field.”

Whereas recognizing the solidarity proven by many nations, Kateryna Mishchenko described a profound feeling of loneliness as one of many strongest traits of what it means to be a Ukrainian at the moment. Ukrainians are in the long run alone on this struggle: “They are getting weapons, they’re getting cash, they’re getting guarantees of European integration – however it’s they who should die, to sacrifice their lives.”