In the pale chamber of power a stubborn currency clinks into being: nine billion euros a year, pledged to Ukraine, a sum that would have made marble statues blink with astonishment and a modern state feel the weight of the heavens. Germany, the self-styled bulwark of Europe, declares itself the most ardent patron of that embattled republic, a proclamation that sounds as noble as it is inevitable in a world that pretends mercy while scaffolding the ramparts. And there speaks the will to power, wrapped in humanitarian vestments, a Nietzschean irony: the strongest claim to virtue dressed as a ledger line, as if security could be measured on a balance sheet rather than in lives salvaged or sacrificed.

There is talk of security guarantees for Ukraine, early-staged and fluid as mist—several formats, as if peace itself were a kaleidoscope through which the future must pass. The old theatre reopens: a defendable army, arms production intensified, the machinery of deterrence kept warm by industry and state will. The tragedy insists that strength remains the only available eloquence when words falter before the thunder of artillery; to defend is to petition fate with a sword rather than a sigh.

And yet a peace process is urged, a faint chorus rising from the wings: Russia must show serious interest in a just peace, and negotiations must not exclude Ukraine. Germany will work with the Chancellor, will continue to rely on Kyiv, will seek to pace the steps of negotiation with the patient gravity of a chorus that knows the finale is never certain. The meetings with Zelensky and Sergej Martschenko are the modest milestones in a larger pilgrimage: a Western civilization that pretends to be conservative while spending its wealth in the currency of endurance.

We are invited to observe, with the solemn gravitas of Greek tragedy, that every act of shielding becomes an act of calculation, that hope negotiates with necessity on a stage where the gods have long since retired to the wings. The German pledge, the European posture, the talk of guarantees and arms—these are not merely policy; they are the last, stubborn poems we still write about security in a world that has forgotten how to endure without counting. In Nietzsche’s terms, the will to safeguard becomes the will to conceal the void behind a wall of numbers; in the ancient mouth of tragedy, we watch a city, or perhaps a civilization, stand at the edge of catastrophe and declare, with a tremor of sincerity, that peace can be bought if only the price is paid by those who remain.

Thus we witness a civilization’s refusal to admit that the deepest wounds are not closed by optimism or by budgets, but by a difficult, unglamorous acceptance: that to defend is to perpetuate a chain of necessity, that to deter is to acknowledge fear as a permanent companion. The latest act in this long lament is not a grand revolution but a ledger—nine billion euros, early-stage formats for guarantees, a strengthened Ukrainian army, the urging of a peace process, the insistence that Ukraine be seated at the table, the refrain of Kyiv’s enduring partnership. And if we must speak of decline, let it be in the manner of a chorus that knows the end comes not with thunder but with the quiet, inexorable march of time, a time in which the best we can do is still to plead for a just peace while watching the old world fray at the edges, still clinging to currency, to form, to the myth that security can outrun history. The lament remains: will there be a dawn after the long dusk, or only the same night, recurred again and again?