The horrors of Mariupolja are a warning of a new danger for Sarajevo

The recent European summit in Versailles missed a great opportunity: to launch a new post-war European order in a symbolic place. We are not dreamers; we know that joining the European Union is not so simple and that the same procedures apply in principle to Ukraine as to the candidate countries in the Balkans. But there was an opportunity to establish a political union that would bridge the gap between looser association and full membership. Instead, European leaders acted as if the EU's regular peacetime procedures were still appropriate in the extreme case of war in Europe. The Freedom and Peace Project gave way to the Union of Bureaucrats and Clerks.

However, the EU is no longer the economic union of recent years; Vladimir Putin unintentionally returned it to the form of a normative and institutional alliance from the years of its foundation. This should become the case again, because now the task is not only to protect Ukraine from Russian aggression, but also to strengthen the protection of its newer members, especially the Baltic states, and to include all those countries that want to join the EU with this protection. What is needed is an "extended Weimar Triangle" (connecting Germany, France and Poland since 1991). This would give special attention to the regional expansion of the security dimension within the EU.

Germany, France, Poland and the Baltic States must enter into stronger cooperation in security policy, if necessary also in the field of nuclear deterrence. Great Britain needs to re-engage with the European political community, an association that Brexit carelessly squandered. But stronger protection from Russia also means that Putin's Trojan horses, such as Viktor Orban's Hungary and Aleksandar Vučić's Serbia, should be more decisively opposed. This raises questions, first of all, about the implementation of the basic legal obligations of Hungary's membership in the EU and the further status of Serbia as a candidate country for EU membership.

Bosnia and Herzegovina deserves special attention in this context. Serbian politicians in Belgrade and Banja Luka are encouraging divisive tendencies that, 30 years after the start of the war in Yugoslavia, are breaking up the fragile Bosnian-Herzegovinian confederation. They even make a new war between ethnic groups in that country seem possible. Greater Serbia separatists can be sure of the active support of the Putin regime.

Putin has provided the blueprint for such shameful maneuvers in front of all of us since 2008 in the case of Georgia, and since 2014 in Ukraine. The EU turned a blind eye to it, ignoring the provocations of the Kremlin and the divisive maneuvers of the opponents of European unity, from Marine Le Pen to Orban. While Putin carefully prepared his plans of attack, Europe's energy dependence increased dramatically, while German defense spending decreased. All this was actively promoted by the main political actors, not only in Germany, despite the clear evidence of Russian neo-imperialism. This imposes a special obligation today.

European citizens have now heard the shots fired in anger, and their governments are coming together again in defense of democratic values ​​and institutions. Together, they decided on sanctions against Russia and the delivery of weapons to Ukraine, but they cannot prevent the suffering of the Ukrainian civilian population. Just as sanctions and arms deliveries should have come, at the latest, when the Russian army is deployed to the borders of Ukraine in 2021, we must not wait now in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina until it is too late there as well.

A clear signal to Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as to NATO member Montenegro, would show that these two countries are considered part of the democratic world and belong to the extended European community.

In 1992, we asked Europe to take decisive action for the besieged city of Sarajevo, but in vain. It was only the genocide that triggered the belated intervention, which was not followed by a stable order in the Balkans. Today, the EU should be more vigilant and express a clear intention to include Bosnia and Herzegovina in the political community, which includes assistance against possible provocations and aggression. It should support an alliance that warns Serbian separatists and obliges Croatia, as well as Slovenia, to support the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and to participate in a stable post-war order throughout the Balkans. The Serbian government must realize that its option to join the EU will be lost if it threatens the precarious peace order in the Balkans and tries to gain an advantage in the turmoil of the Ukrainian war. Putin's "Russian world" project had a forerunner in the "Serbian world" of Slobodan Milošević, in which compatriots from Bosnia and Montenegro were to be brought home to their mother empire, just as ethnic Russians in Crimea and the Donbass region were brought "home" in 2014. Milošević's dream had a famous ending at the International Criminal Court.

Serbs in Banja Luka and Belgrade have to decide which side they belong to. Milorad Dodik, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, opposed sanctions against Russia, and Russian (and Chinese) stakeholders come and go in Belgrade. A clear signal to Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as to NATO member Montenegro, would show that these two countries are considered part of the democratic world and belong to the extended European community. Efforts aimed at abolishing the practice of basing electoral law and state administration on ethnic proportionality are increasingly echoing in Bosnian civil society, especially among the younger generation for whom ethnic nationalism offers no chance for peace and prosperity. In this way, Putin may end up inadvertently strengthening the European Union.

Daniel Kon-Bendit was the chairman of the Green group in the European Parliament; Timothy Garton Ashe is Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford; Ireneus Pavel Karolevski is a professor of political theory and democratic studies at the University of Leipzig; Klaus Legevi is a professor at the University of Giessen

Translated and edited by: A. Šofranac