The title question is one that was being considered this week by European officials from the Council of Europe during a meeting in Iceland. At this point, it’s a rather daunting task, but they are working to develop a method to estimate all of the damage caused in Ukraine as a result of the war. One of their major steps was the creation of a “register of damages” where any Ukrainian or other affected persons in the region can report losses that they have experienced. But it’s going to need to be a fairly large register because most of the country’s infrastructure has been reduced to rubble and some entire families have been wiped out, so it’s unclear who would report those losses or who would receive any resultant benefits. And then, of course, there’s the question of whether Russia would simply ignore the bill. (Associated Press)

Leaders from across Europe were wrapping a two-day summit on Wednesday, putting the final touches on a system to establish the damage Russia is causing during the war in Ukraine, in the hopes it can be forced to compensate victims and help rebuild the nation once the conflict is over.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine was the dominant topic during the meeting in the Icelandic capital, Reykjavík, where delegations from the Council of Europe discussed how the continent’s preeminent human rights organization can support Kyiv.

The most tangible outcome of the meeting — the first summit the Council of Europe has held in nearly two decades — is the creation of the register of damages.

The register would be housed in The Hague if it’s established. The proposal didn’t garner unanimous support, however. 10 of the council’s 46 member countries in Europe declined to sign off on it, including Hungary, Turkey and Serbia.

It’s entirely possible that this will turn out to be a symbolic measure, unfortunately. Historically, reparations from war are paid by the losers. Germany had to pay crippling reparations after World War 1, but those payments were forced on them by an international coalition of the eventual winners. We still don’t know how the conflict in Ukraine will end, assuming it ever does, but the idea that Ukraine will somehow “defeat” Russia entirely seems preposterous.

If and when the war is actually over, the odds are that Russia would see any demand for reparations as an admission that they did something wrong. This also strikes me as unlikely. And what will the West do if Putin (or his successor) simply refuses to pay? Slap more sanctions on them? They’re already under sanctions stretching as far as the eye can see and it clearly hasn’t altered Moscow’s behavior.

This proposal brings us back to the larger question that we’ve been posing here for more than a year. Assuming there is a settlement of some sort and the fighting ends, how does the world navigate back to how things were in the pre-invasion days? Is there any feasible path back to “normal” after this? Are we supposed to simply start rebuilding Ukraine’s infrastructure, gradually let all of the sanctions expire, and pretend this never happened? Or will the Russian Federation be permanently under sanctions and barred from most international banking and financial institutions?

If this is a permanent condition, the global economy will be permanently divided and weaker than it was in the pre-war days. Perhaps that’s not an entirely bad thing, but everyone will have to make some adjustments and learn to deal with the new alliances that are forming this year.