The Russian invasion of Ukraine puts an end to a whole generation of German politicians across the spectrum.
This is not the first time Germany has played for the wrong team in history. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Berlin has been in the wrong camp for the past 16 years when it comes to how to treat Russia. Less predictable was the speed with which Germany renounced its position on Moscow in recent weeks, halting the dubious Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline project, sending weapons to Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia.
She even announced that she was going to pour large sums into her own army, Politico writes. In other words, almost at night, Berlin agreed to do everything that the United States and other allies had demanded of it for years. He even came up with a slogan for these changes – Zeitenwende, the dawn of a new era. A few weeks later, it became clear that German leaders were just trying to say one thing: “Let's move on.”
From this point of view, the success of the Germans can be compared with the achievements of the Russian army in Ukraine. Because Germany is not just “misunderstanding Putin,” as Angela Merkel's longtime foreign policy adviser and newly-elected head of the Munich Security Conference, Christoph Heusgen, said last week. Germany's stubbornness to cooperate with the Russian leader despite his constant aggression (the range of crimes ranges from invading Georgia to killing political enemies abroad and war crimes in Syria) was a catastrophic mistake made by Merkel in the pantheon of political naivete alongside Neville Chamberlain.
Slowly but surely, the Germans began to notice that Merkel's soft approach to Russia, culminating in the decision to give the green light to Nord Stream 2 in 2015, despite the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, actually encouraged Putin to continue. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is not just a cross on Merkel's chancellor's legacy, but a generation of German politicians from across the spectrum blinded by nostalgia for “Ostpolitik” and “changes through trade” – Chancellor Willy Brandt's approach in the 1970s. The Germans believe that these political approaches ended the Cold War.
German collective responsibility is one of the reasons why it is easier to say the need to “turn the page” than it is to do so. There is no Churchill-like figure in German politics who has warned for years about how dangerous it is to trust Putin. Merkel, of course, is most responsible for falling into the trap of the Russian leader. But the truth is that the entire German political class is to blame.
As former finance minister and vice chancellor in Merkel's cabinet, current Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose Social Democrats were the main force promoting Nord Stream 2, has now led the narrative that the best way to deal with Putin is to lead endlessly. ” dialogue “. His national security adviser, Jens Plutner, became the chief architect of such a policy during the years when he was an influential diplomat in the German Foreign Ministry under Foreign Minister Franco-Walter Steinmeier (another Social Democrat).
Even when Putin withdrew tens of thousands of troops to the Ukrainian border in December, Pletner advised Scholz to support Nord Stream 2 and publicly reiterate the fiction that the pipeline was just a “commercial project.” Former leader Pletner Steinmeier, who in 2016 accused NATO of “brandishing weapons and inciting war” when the alliance was training on the eastern flank, argued until the first shots at Ukrainians that Germany should use energy as a way to build bridges with Russia.
Today, Steinmeier, who, as president, should serve as a moral authority for Germany, organizes concerts “for freedom and peace”, which are attended by Russian and Ukrainian musicians . One such concert took place in early March in Dresden, while Russian bombs fell on Kharkov. Over the weekend, Ukraine's ambassador to Germany Andrei Melnik announced that he would boycott the latest event organized by Steinmeier, saying that Ukrainians do not have time for “great Russian culture” while Moscow kills innocent civilians.
The Liberal Democrats and the Greens are less responsible for the policies that led to Russia's invasion of Ukraine than Merkel's CDU / CSU and the Social Democrats. But they also did not deserve political fame.
The Greens were against Nord Stream-2. But this was dictated more by environmental views than by solidarity with Ukraine. More important was the protest against the transfer of weapons to Kiev. This position changed only after the start of the war. The Free Democrats split over Nord Stream 2. At the same time, the majority in the party, including the party's deputy leader Wolfgang Kubicki, supported greater cooperation with Russia. According to Melnik, the leader of the Free Democrats, Christian Lindner, who is also the Minister of Finance, once told him that if the war starts, it will no longer make sense to send weapons to Ukraine or disconnect Russia from SWIFT. Because Ukrainian sovereignty in this case will live for a few hours.
Skepticism about Ukraine's prospects, not to mention the effects of strong pressure on Russia, was also widespread in the main opposition party, the CDU. A few weeks before the Russian invasion, party leader Friedrich Merz warned that Russia's disconnection from SWIFT would be a “nuclear explosion in the capital markets.”
Making mistakes about Russia and Putin at every turn, German politicians are now playing the card under the slogan: “Who knew ?!”.
“I was wrong. We were all wrong, “said Wolfgang Schaeuble, who has been the CDU's finance minister for many years.
But Schaeuble and his colleagues prefer not to recall all the reservations of German allies, which should not be underestimated by Putin. The Germans do not know how to react when they are shown reality. After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reminded German deputies during a speech in the Bundestag that German business was helping Russia finance the war against his country, they applauded him. And then they returned to their daily affairs. In particular, congratulated one of the deputies on his birthday.
During the Cold War, the term “useful idiot” was applied to moderate figures in the West who believed the Communists' claims. From the German veto on Ukraine and Georgia's accession to NATO in 2008 to attempts to conclude gas agreements with Moscow and the refusal to send weapons to Kiev, German leaders have been useful to Putin's idiots.
Meanwhile, the so-called Russlandversteher – the so-called Russian sympathizers who flooded the country's political establishment – rejected criticism of their course, insisting they knew better, literally laughing in Washington's face. Now no one is laughing. Although the Allies applaud the Berlin “change of era”, they are not deceived by these cunning changes. Ukraine, which Germany looted during World War II and lost more than 15% of its population at the time, will certainly not forget or forgive. Germany will not gain real confidence in NATO, no matter how many billions it spends on its defense, until there is fair retribution for Merkel's history with Putin.
