Russia’s Imperial War
On the fateful Thursday of 24 February 2022, peace and stability in Europe came to an unexpected but long foretold end. The Europe of the Helsinki Accords, resting on the cornerstone of the inviolability of borders reached its date of expiration. In unprovoked and unjustified war of imperial conquest Russia attacked Ukraine from the east in Donbas, from the south along the shores of the Azov and Black seas, and from the north. The last onslaught was the most treacherous because it was Belarus that allowed the Russian tanks to roll onto the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv.
In the face of this military juggernaut, only thanks to unprecedented bravery of Ukrainians themselves (inadvertently helped by the Kremlin being cocksure to win in a couple of days) the massive three-pronged offensive was stopped in its tracks. Kyiv was saved. In the latter half of March 2022, the Ukrainian counteroffensive compelled the Russian beleaguering troops to withdraw from the capital’s vicinity.
‘Peace for Russia’s Genocide in Ukraine’
In April and May 2022, I happened to teach at Jena University in Germany. After the disorderly withdrawal of the Russian forces from around Kyiv, the mind-boggling scale of destruction and the loss of life became known to all. It was unprecedented in Europe after World War II. Russia’s genocidal massacres in Bucha and Borodyanka shocked the world. Meanwhile, the Russian siege of the Azov Sea port city of Mariupol was coming to an end. The Russians razed the city and buried tens of thousands of civilian victims under the rubble from the blocks of apartments.
During the time, various groupings and parties, including members of Germany’s ruling SPD party, organized ‘peace rallies’ in Jena and across Germany. Openly or tacitly, the intended peace entailed that Germany would not be sending any weapons to Ukraine, while the latter country under attack would have to surrender to Russia.
It did not matter to these German pacifists that in such a scenario the Kremlin would press on with its genocidal program of liquidating Ukraine and the Ukrainians as a state and as a nation, that the Ukrainian elite would be exterminated and the country ‘ruralized,’ while most of its inhabitants would end up either exiled to Siberia or in forced labor concentration camps. That Ukraine would be turned into another Russian province, and its human and economic potential harnessed for the Kremlin’s future neoimperial conquests of the countries located between Russia and Germany. Russian propagandists threatened the Germans with Russian tanks rolling in Berlin again, so that they would not dare to oppose Moscow.
German Confusion
A couple of days after Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the German government officially condemned the Kremlin and promised to send weapons in aid of Ukraine’s defence. Yet, what followed was a long series of procrastinations and equivocations. Not a surprising outcome, given the former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder remains a card-carrying SPD member. He is a bosom friend of Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin and bears responsibility for making Germany overdependent on Russia’s oil and gas. None other than Schröder and his SPD party enabled Putin to make hydrocarbons into a tool of political pressure and blackmail for disuniting the European Union and NATO.
Schröder and his likes also got rich in this process. Now they want to keep their ill-gotten wealth but to retain respectability as ‘exemplary democrats.’ They hope for a return to the old, corrupted status quo of cheap oil and gas for the Germans in return for allowing the Kremlin to pursue its imperialist ambitions in the ‘intermediary zone’ between Germany and Russia. A new-style appeasement in the name of ‘business as usual’ at the ‘acceptable’ cost, including, 8 million refugees from Ukraine and 6.5 million internally displaced within the country, alongside 40,000 civilian casualties. In the near future all the three numbers will only go up.
Berlin’s Prudence
Following Ukraine’s recapture of the southern city of Kherson in November 2022, the front stopped moving. It remained immobile, despite fierce continual exchanges of fire of the intensity and duration not seen since World War II. This stalemate lasted until mid-January 2023, when the Russian troops captured the mining town of Soledar, near Bakhmut in Donbas. The moment of reckoning is coming.
Meanwhile, in spring 2022, Berlin promised to send 100 tanks to Ukraine. But shortly afterward, the German government went back on its words, claiming that in the situation of heightened insecurity in Europe, Germany must keep these tanks for itself. What a great example of probity and spectacular prudence.
In May 2022, Germany promised 15 anti-craft Gepard tanks for Ukraine. A welcome new opening, but initially with next to nothing by the way of ammunition. An ideal deal for Russia, Ukraine ended up with Western guns without ammo. By fall last year, Kyiv received double the number of the promised Gepards. However, this did not help much. During the last quarter of 2022, Russian rockets destroyed half of Ukraine’s energy and other critical infrastructure. In the dead of the 2022-23 winter, at any given time, two to ten million Ukrainians are deprived of electricity and heating.
Time is Over
It does not matter for the Germans who, unlike millions of Ukrainians, do not live in makeshift emergency housing or a half-destroyed block of apartments. The Germans do not have to make do in sub-zero temperatures with no power or heat. They do not starve or suffer thirst. Getting one’s daily bread and water in present-day Germany does not entail ducking mortar fire or facing the ever-present danger of death, courtesy of Russian rockets periodically falling from the sky.
Obviously, at present the Kremlin is preparing a spring offensive. Materials and troops are being amassed on the Donbas front. Last fall the Russian army mobilized 300,000 reservists. Now Moscow mulls mobilizing half a million conscripts. It does not matter for Russia and the country’s public opinion that over 100,000 of Russian soldiers already died in this war. More are eager to enlist or will be compelled into the Russian war’s meat-grinder.
On the other hand, the situation is critical for Ukraine and Europe. What is being decided amounts to the existential question whether the Ukrainians and Europeans will live under democracy or Russia’s neo-imperialist totalitarianism triumphs. Post-communist and post-Soviet EU and NATO members share with the Ukrainians an acute awareness of this stark choice that now faces the continent. After all, it is Estonia and Latvia that sent almost 1% of their GDP to Ukraine in aid, while Poland almost 0.5%. On the other hand, the biggest donors in absolute terms are the US, EU and UK. Germany with its largest economy in Europe and the fifth largest in the world lags considerably behind Britain and is just marginally ahead of Canada in helping Ukraine. It is not good enough. Since September 2022 the call has been increasingly more often voiced for granting Ukraine with modern and versatile Leopard fighting tanks.
Importantly, Germany and its European NATO allies have these tanks in abundance, around 2,000. Russia already lost 2,000 tanks in Ukraine, but still has 2,000 more for sending to the front. That is why Leopards are urgently needed for breaking the impasse on the front. These tanks would help Ukraine gain the upper hand in the face of Russia’s advantage in the sheer numbers of tanks and mobilized troops.
Berlin: A New Opening?
At long last, the reality of Russia’s total war of utter destruction on Ukraine appeared to dawn with crystal-clear clarity on the German government and the country’s elite. Finnish politicians tried to shame Berlin to hand Leopards over to Kyiv. Berlin did not rule out this possibility. But only a day later, a statement was issued that there were no plans to this end. Frustrated with another of Germany’s equivocations in the context of the existential danger to both Ukraine and Europe, France and Poland leaned on Berlin hard to change the tack. Warsaw even pronounced it could pass its (rather meager) stock of Leopards to Kyiv, even without Berlin’s consent.
A new German minister of defence was sworn in Berlin on 19 January 2023. The NATO and EU allies hoped this occasion heralded an administrative and symbolical step toward Germany’s expected nod to sending Leopards to Ukraine. But to everyone’s frustration, on 20 January, at the meeting of 50 countries at the US military base in Ramstein, the new German defence minister equivocated like his predecessor used to. He ambiguously pronounced, ‘I’m very sure there will be a decision in the short term, but I don’t know how the decision will look.’ To control the damage incurred to Germany’s already tarnished reputation, subsequently the minister twitted that his country ‘will not stop supporting Ukraine.’
Under non-belligerent circumstances, this ‘assurance’ would sound like an ironic ‘No.’ Yet, at the turning point in this war that will decide Europe’s immediate future, ‘no decision’ on this matter is a strategic win for the Kremlin. This indecision is killing even more innocent Ukrainians. And inadvertently or not, Berlin granted the Russian president more time to prepare a successful offensive this spring. In turn, Kyiv and Europe are left short-changed by the country that styles itself as the leader of democracy and the West in Europe.
Is the incumbent German government really so myopic? Does it have to see eye to eye with the likes of Messrs Putin and Schröder on the ‘Russian peace’ (Russkiy mir) plan for Ukraine (and Europe)? Are totalitarianism and imperialism still so desirable in 21st-century Europe, oil or not oil? For the time being, Germany’s allies seethe. But Moscow approves and at the same time wields the pedagogic stick of Soviet tanks rolling across Berlin in 1945. Will Berlin succumb to Russian propaganda, its well-established links with Moscow, and in the result forsake democracy and integrated Europe?
