Germany - World War III.2
"While supporting Ukraine we must, at the same time, remain aware of how to prevent an escalation that might cause a war between Russia and NATO. I promise, no matter how big the pressure becomes, that I will always act prudently to resolve issues in such a dangerous situation. We have to avoid the big war - the war between Russia and NATO. We must at the same time ensure that Ukraine is able to defend its sovereignty and independence," German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said 30 May 2024.
Dmitry Stratievski, commenting on the collapse of the ruling coalition in Germany and the conservative candidate for chancellor, noted : "Merz has made several harsh statements about Russia and its aggression against Ukraine. Criticizing Scholz for «exaggerated fears», the politician suggested giving Putin an ultimatum: if the bombing of civilians did not stop within 24 hours, the West should lift all restrictions on the use of weapons supplied to Ukraine, and Kyiv could count on receiving Taurus «in a week». Merz called for «everything possible to be done to support Ukraine, except our entry into the war». Merz did not hold back on the pro-Russian forces in German politics either, calling representatives of the AFfD and Sahra Wagenknecht’s Bloc «useful idiots acting in the interest of Russia and China»".
German expert Serhii Sumlenny noted 02 November 2024 "We see a deep crisis within the Social Democratic Party, which Scholz leads. We’ve seen that people who supported Gerhard Schröder—maybe the worst German Chancellor before Scholz and since 1949—but who endorsed him as a great Social Democrat, are now in top positions within the Social Democratic Party.... the Social Democrats are in deep collapse. The party has openly betrayed Ukraine, and Chancellor Scholz not only witnesses this but is somehow part of this shameless development.... They seem to believe Ukraine has lost the war, that continued fighting makes no sense, and that Russia will eventually stop without advancing further. But all of these assumptions are wrong. Ukraine is successfully fighting back, albeit with severe difficulties. Russia is certainly defeatable with enough weapons, but Germany still has not sent long-range missiles and has only sent a limited amount of equipment—what, maybe 20 or 30 Leopard 2 tanks?... As for the idea that Russia would stop at the Dnipro River or any such boundary, who told you that? Vladimir Putin himself has said that Russia’s borders never end. Every time Russia claims it won’t go further, it does. They promised never to annex Crimea, then Donbas, and then never to attack Ukraine."
The Pentagon said in July 2024 that the US would begin episodic deployments of long-range weapons in Germany as part of planning for ensuring the stationing of these weapons in the future by 2026. This includes the SM-6, Tomahawk and developmental hypersonic missiles. On July 28, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that if US military weapons were deployed in Germany, Russia would deem itself free from the moratorium on the deployment of medium- and shorter-range strike weapons.Every second German citizen believes that a planned deployment of US long-range weapons may lead to a possible escalation with Russia, a survey conducted by the Civey polling institute showed on 09 August 2024. Those polled German nationals who are not concerned over the possible escalation amounted to 38% and 12% were undecided, the survey found. As many as 44% of those sampled positively viewed the deployment, while 42% negatively assessed the move and 14% abstained, the poll showed. At the same time, only 26% of German nationals residing in East Germany, the former German Democratic Republic, supported the government's plans, while 60% expressed opposition, the poll said. A half of those residing in western Germany were in favor of the US missile deployment, and 36% were against the move, the survey added.
One of the most influential German historians and member of the SPD, Heinrich August Winkler, attacked in an open letter the SPD leadership in the face of Russian aggression. Winkler and four more historians - all of them members of the SPD - described Scholz and others in the SPD for being in denial of reality when it comes to Putin's intentions. "The communication of the Chancellor, the SPD and the parliamentary group leaders on questions of arms deliveries is rightly being sharply criticized in public. Arguments and justifications are therefore repeatedly arbitrary, erratic and not infrequently factually incorrect," says the two-page letter. (...) "If the Chancellor and the SPD leadership draw red lines not for Russia, but exclusively for German politics, they will permanently weaken German security policy and play into Russia's hands." Winkler has been a member of the SPD for more than 60 years.
Germany and the EU stand shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine. Our financial, humanitarian, military and economic assistance continues. Since the start of Russia’s war of aggression, Germany has to date provided Ukraine with support and payments to the tune of around 32 billion euro. Germany is thus one of the most important backers around the world. Germany provides support for Ukraine by supplying equipment and weapons, these come from supplies of the Federal Arms Forces and from deliveries from industry financed from the Federal Government’s funds for security capacity building. Military aid worth around 28 billion euros has by now been made available by Germany or been earmarked for supporting Ukraine over the next few years.
The new Russian 11th grade history textbook of September 2023 described the reunification of Germany as the "annexation" of the communist East. German historians say it distorts history and fits the anti-Western narrative of the Putin regime. "From the point of view of Putin and his 'historical falsifiers', unification was an act of colonization: The strong imperialist West subjugates the weak East," says Ute Frevert, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, commenting on the Russian interpretation: "That corresponds in no way to the historical facts. But it fits the anti-Western narrative of the Putin regime."
According to Zaur Gasimov, lecturer in Eastern European history at the University of Bonn, the new textbook "perceives reunification in the context of then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika policy, which, from the perspective of the Russian establishment, helped trigger the collapse of the Soviet empire. It is viewed by Medinsky and the wider establishment as an important milestone in the "movement of the entire east central Europe and the Baltics towards NATO and is condemned as such," says Gasimov, adding that this could possibly explain "the radical change in terms from "reunification" to "annexation."
Social Democrats maintained a good relationship with Russia, including the SPD parliamentary group leader Rolf Mützenich [as of 2022], who always insisted that Germany should have as good a relationship with Russia as with the United States. The “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck, the founder of the united German state, once prophetically said: “A war between Germany and Russia is the greatest stupidity. That’s why it’s bound to happen.”
In early 2022 Ukrainian Ambassador Andrij Melnyk blamed the SPD, the party of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, for Berlin's refusal to deliver heavy weapons to Ukraine or impose an immediate embargo on gas and oil deliveries from Russia. Melnyk also claims that leading SPD politicians had a "highly questionable closeness to Russia" in recent years and decades. Melnyk stated that the "Putin-friendly" policies of the "SPD cronies" had "brought about the barbaric war of extermination against the state, nation, culture, women and children in the first place."
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier admitted to making mistakes. For almost 15 years, he had pursued the idea of a close cooperation with the Kremlin centered on energy. "Change through trade" or even "change through interdependence" was the name of the strategy, which aimed at a partnership with Russia that would modernize the country and diminish its authoritarianism. No matter what Putin did, whether it was the 2008 war in Georgia, the suppression of the opposition in Russia, or the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Steinmeier was always among those who opposed harsher rules or imposing sanctions. As recently as 2016, two years after the annexation of Crimea, Steinmeier scolded NATO's "loud saber-rattling and war cries" on the alliance's "eastern border," when 10,000 NATO troops held maneuvers in Poland and the Baltics to practice defensive maneuvers.
Today, the German president speaks of having "failed": "We held on to bridges that Russia no longer believed in and that our partners warned us against," he admitted in early April 2022. Another former SPD foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, admits, "It was a mistake not to listen to the Eastern Europeans when they objected to Nord Stream 2. That was my mistake, too." It is not easy to convince everyone that almost everything that was once considered right is now supposed to be wrong.
The new "Traffic Light" coalition in 2022 of very different partners had to learn the hard way what it meant to be in power. The SPD sacrificed the myth of Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik – East Policy –, the Greens, who partly stem from the peace movement, send weapons to a warzone and the Liberals (FDP) with the ideal of a slim state and austerity policy become the biggest spenders in history.
Russia and Germany have a complicated history since the two states became powerful players on the European continent in the 18th century. Depending on the historical context and their respective political and economic interests, the two states share a history of both animosity and partnership. Germany was historically rooted in Prussia, whose capital Kaliningrad in the Baltics is now a Russian province, while some of Russia’s tzars like Catherine the Great were ethnic Germans. During both WWI and WWII, the two states were on the opposite sides, fighting bitterly with each other.
"Germany, according to a number of relevant characteristics – this is neither mine, nor Russia’s opinion, this is according to politological terms and metrics – remains, one way or another, an occupied state: 30,000 of American [troops] are stationed there,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told RT. Zakharova added that “American ambassadors to Germany, who are supposed to work there to improve bilateral relations, are giving orders to German officials.” Richard Grenell, who was the US ambassador to Berlin during the Trump presidency, was “giving them orders literally every day on what to do on issues such as Nord Stream 2.”
Russia, by contrast, refuses to be talked to this way. “You can order around anyone who likes it – but we don’t, so you won’t talk like that to us,” Zakharova said. “If you violate something that concerns our interests and go against international law, you will receive actions in response.” She said, “Germany needs this gas not because they like Russia or want to please us – they just need it, it’s what feeds their economy, it’s a resource their industrial development hinges on, it’s what they need to live, basically… a vital issue.”
Social Democratic Party (SPD) legend Egon Bahr is considered the architect of Chancellor Willy Brand's "Ostpolitik". Until his death in 2015, Bahr argued that even the increasingly authoritarian Russia should be integrated into the European security order, finding many supporters among Social Democrats. That was a mistake, according to the SPD's current co-chair Lars Klingbeil. "'Change through trade' was the order of the day," he said at a March 2022 commemorative event at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Berlin. "This concept has failed."
Were people in the SPD too naive? "In retrospect, of course, we have to ask ourselves whether we should have assessed the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, or the Russian contract killings in London and Berlin differently," Klingbeil asked self-critically. "Whether we misjudged the signs of the times." Those who have consistently had an excuse and explanation for Russian President Vladimir Putin's actions have often been called "Russland-Versteher" (Russia understanders). Those same people have brushed aside concerns about Germany's ever-increasing dependence on Russian energy. There were many in Germany who held such views — especially in the eastern German states that constituted the territory of the former GDR.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that he still considers Bahr's statement that peace in Europe is only possible with and not against Russia, to be true. "But, at the same time, we must recognize that the current policy of the Russian leadership is a real threat to security in Europe," the chancellor said. "That is the regrettable starting point of a Russia policy that must begin with a sober look at reality, entirely in the spirit of Egon Bahr, but which does not stop there." He added that anyone who wants peace must be prepared to negotiate. "We, too, keep channels of talks open and use every possibility of mediation," he said.
Scholz managed to grab some national and international attention, namely by stating that the time has come for peace negotiations to end the Ukraine war. And, most sensationally, he has uttered the breathtakingly innovative idea – in the West at least – that Russia, one of the parties to the conflict, should actually be in the room. According to leak-based but not implausible reports, the German chancellor’s office is even working on a specific plan for peace – already dubbed “Minsk III” that includes Ukraine officially ceding territory to Russia. In other words, if such a plan is really in the works, it includes accepting that Ukraine has lost the war, and so has the West, very much including Germany, the largest single-country supporter of Ukraine after the US.
The right/far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD), the left-conservative BSW of Sarah Wagenknecht (the two big winners of the Thuringia and Saxony elections) and the Die Linke party are much more in favor of making peace with Russia than Scholz. the CDU, in the opposition but doing well, is making the best of Scholz’s inconsistency by talking about “doing Putin a favor” and “rewarding the aggressor.”
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