Footage from the 2024 Lennart Meri Conference held in May in Tallinn, Estonia seems to reveal a new goalpost for the E.U. in regards to the Ukraine-Russia conflict. The former Estonian Prime Minister and incoming E.U. foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas spoke before the conference asserting that “Russia’s defeat is not a bad thing, because […] there are many different nations a part of Russia,” concluding that “if you have small nations it’s not a bad thing if the big power is much smaller.” Russia has served an arrest warrant for Kallas during her tenure as Estonian Prime Minister, citing her campaign to remove memorials dedicated to Estonian Soviets who fought against the S.S. during World War Two. Kallas’s remarks could easily be interpreted as an escalation in the conflict between the West and Russia, with the aim of the E.U. seeming to become less about the prospects for democracy in Ukraine and more about the removal of Russia as a challenge to Western hegemony. 

Kallas’s remarks are not entirely unprecedented rhetoric among E.U. and N.A.T.O. leaders. In March 2022, Joe Biden declared that “for God’s sake this man (Putin) cannot remain in power.” While the U.S. media frequently treated this omission as another Biden gaffe, one could not ignore the possibility that the president had failed to keep under wraps the true objective of the confrontation with Russia. President Biden’s remarks came right around the time that former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a visit to President Zelenskyy which coincided with Ukraine’s backing out of peace negotiations with Putin. Sources close to President Zelenskyy told Ukrainian outlet Ukrayinska Pravda that Johnson’s message was “that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, we [N.A.T.O.] are not.”

As the conflict between the West and Russia in Ukraine drags on, the goal of restoring democracy to the fledgling state seems increasingly dubious. Take for example President Zelenskyy’s decision to suspend elections and continue serving under an expired term. Despite the supposed goal of arming Zelenskyy’s regime to prevent authoritarian contagion, Western countries have issued no rebuke of Zelenskyy’s rule under an expired mandate. The large-scale conscription of Ukrainian men to become cannon fodder on the front lines of the conflict combined with Zelenskyy’s continued refusal to even host Russian diplomats at peace talks further erodes any pretense of democracy preservation under his rule. 

While Kallas’s statement may seem to be no more than rhetorical muscle flexing, it is clear that the goal of destabilizing the Russian regime has been in the crosshairs of E.U. and N.A.T.O. countries for some time. In May 2023, a drone strike on the Kremlin was largely thwarted by air defences and by Putin’s absence from the building at that time. According to U.S. officials, the assassination plot had all the earmarks of a plot by Ukrainian security services. Whether or not N.A.T.O. countries colluded with Ukrainian security services in this plot is unclear, however, the belligerent attack did not prevent the U.S. and N.A.T.O. countries from arming Ukraine with long-range missiles, cluster bombs and fighter jets. 

The paradigm of the conflict between N.A.T.O. and Russia continues to shift. Over time, the goalposts for N.A.T.O. have frequently changed, while Russia’s demands for peace have largely remained static. For Russia’s appeasement, the majority ethnically Russian Donetsk and Luhansk regions will need to be integrated into Russia in continuity with their September 2022 referendum vote to join Russia. In addition to this, N.A.T.O. must pledge to cease its eastward expansion. These two concessions alone and possibly even less under real negotiation would be all that it takes to restore peace to Eastern Europe. With pro-Russian enclaves in Moldova and civil strife in Georgia, it seems critical now more than ever to halt the expansion of conflict.