Austria And Ukraine: One Year On
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to superficial changes in Austrian foreign policy but not the more fundamental ones many hoped for
Servus!
On Monday, Joe Biden was in Kyiv visiting Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy ahead of the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russian president Vladimir Putin has failed in both his maximalist and minimalist war aims. He was unable to take the Ukrainian capital and install a puppet regime there, and the Ukrainian resistance has now pushed Russia out of around half the territory it took following the invasion. With spring approaching, all indications are that Russia is preparing a new offensive in eastern and southern Ukraine. In Kyiv, Biden announced an additional $500 million in assistance to Ukraine, which “include[s] more military equipment, including artillery ammunition.”
One of the pleasant surprises of this war, the historian Stephen Kotkin told The New Yorker’s David Remnick in a recent interview, has been “Europe’s adaptability and fortitude. … They’ve rallied in support of Ukraine pretty much across the board.” Almost 5 million Ukrainian displaced persons are currently registered for Temporary Protection or similar national protection schemes in Europe. European Union (EU) countries and institutions have granted or set aside nearly €52 billion in military, financial, and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine. In June 2022, the European Council granted Ukraine candidate status, putting them on the long, slow path to EU membership and becoming firmly anchored in the Euro-Atlantic family of nations.
Austria has supported the European sanctions and financial aid regime, and to that end, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought about superficial changes in Austrian foreign policy. But there has not been a more fundamental shift away from neutrality and a desire to balance the politico-economic interests of East and West. Europe “switched from their dependence on Russian energy much faster than anybody thought,” Kotkin told Remnick. That’s certainly true of Germany, which has ceased to import Russian natural gas and has pivoted towards Norway and imported liquified national gas (LNG). But that cannot be said of Austria. In December, Russian gas accounted for 71 percent of all gas imported into Austria, and “imports of Russian gas into Austria are [now] approaching market shares last reached during prewar times.”
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While some Austrian firms including the construction giant STRABAG and Austrian Airlines have either withdrawn operations from Russia or suspended them, many more are simply digging in in spite of the Western sanctions regime. These include the wood manufacturing firms Kronospan and EGGER, the food and drink companies Agrana and Kotanyi, and Raiffeisen Bank International. The latter has recently drawn the attention of the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which would purportedly like the bank to “clarify payments business and related processes maintained by RBI in light of the recent developments related to Russia and Ukraine.”
Austrians are now more inclined to agree that their military needs further investment, yet Austrian defense minister Klaudia Tanner recently made clear her country would not be sending any weapons to Ukraine, aligning herself with the worst actor in Europe, Hungary, in the process. Austria also plays no role in the training of Ukranian troops. While Sweden and Finland have re-thought their decades-old neutrality and applied to join NATO, only 14 percent of Austrians said in May they would support Austria doing the same, while 75 percent back the country remaining neutral. Austria has made nothing of its neutrality during the course of this war in terms of diplomacy. It no longer has an active neutrality—as it did when Bruno Kreisky was chancellor and Austria played an outsized role in global affairs—in any meaningful sense.
German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock recently told her European partners, “We are fighting a war against Russia, and not against each other”—in other words that Ukrainian success depends on European unity. When she said this, perhaps Baerbock was thinking about the delicate state-of-play in her own country, where more than 500,000 people have now signed a ‘manifesto for peace’ started by the journalist Alice Schwarzer and far-left politician Sahra Wagenknecht calling for an end to all arms shipments to Ukraine and the start of ‘peace talks’ between the two sides. She might as well, however, have been referencing her neighbor to the south, where support for Ukraine is far weaker.
While 73 percent of Europeans approve of “the different actions taken by the EU to support Ukraine since the start of the war, such as sanctions against the Russian government or financial, military or humanitarian support,” that figure falls to 57 percent among Austrians. 65 percent of Austrians believe Ukraine should start peace negotiations with Russia, even if that meant Ukraine having to permanently relinquish its own territory. That figure rises to 86 percent among supporters of the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), which is leading in the polls again and has made opposing European support to Ukraine a key part of its platform and rhetoric. With gas flowing in and support draining out, Austria appears to have learnt very little from the events of the past 12 months.
Bis bald!