Kanwal Sibal, the former foreign secretary, has sharply criticised the “excessive rhetoric” from European leaders against Russia. Sibal says that such language comes with the risks of prolonged confrontation for Europe.
Sibal's remarks have come amid increasingly forceful remarks against Moscow from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Merz has adopted the toughest positions against Russia in all of Europe.
Sibal took to social media and expressed his concern, saying that the tone adopted by the European capitals reflected a “developing sense of desperation”. He said that walking back from the “demonisation of Putin and Russia” could soon become “politically impossible” for the European leaders.
Sibal noted that Europe, “seems to be invested in war,” and added that the trajectory was “worrisome for the non-western world”, which, he argued, benefits from a stable and peaceful Europe “capable of contributing to global prosperity.”
Merz, at the Munich Security Conference last week, had said that the war in Ukraine would end only when Russia is “at least economically, potentially militarily, exhausted.”
He stressed that Europe must show “firmness and determination” as its freedom is “no longer given”. Describing the fathering of a seismograph for the US-European relations, Merz quipped that the Ukraine war “had forced Europe to return from a vacation from world history,”
Joining in the rhetoric, French President Emmanuel Macron, said that any peace settlement must protect Ukrainians, preserve European security and disincentivise Russia from attempting another invasion while not providing the world with a “calamitous example to follow”
Britain talked of sending weapons to Ukraine to strengthen Ukraine's air defences.
Merz has gone a little further with his rhetoric, which probably stoked Sibal to come out and speak about the issue. Merz was recently quoted as saying that reason and humanitarian arguments would not convince Putin to end the war.
He cited American-French historian, Astophe de Custine, and said that, “we are currently experiencing this country in a state of profound barbarity. Our European goal is to prevent the Russian state from continuing the war.”
Astophe de Custine had said some 200-years back that, “Russia is, in our time, the strangest country for the observer, because in it one finds the deepest barbarity alongside the highest civilisation."
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