How Warrior Women of the North put Germany’s Putin puppets to shame
Remember that MP who earned a fortune while Zooming his Commons votes in from paradise? Now there’s an amazing twist...
After two months of prevarication and excuses, the German government at last agreed this week to send some heavy armour to Ukraine — the kind of military equipment its forces need as they now face the russian military across a broad front in eastern Ukraine, where big artillery will make a difference.
Better late than never, you might think. except that the 50 Gepard (German for cheetah) anti-aircraft vehicles it has approved first saw service in the 1960s and, despite several upgrades, haven’t been part of the German army’s arsenal for over a decade.
the defence company that had kept them in storage wanted to send them to Ukraine in february. But Chancellor Olaf Scholz blocked that — until this week, when he finally bowed to pressure from Nato allies and powerful voices inside Germany.
How big a boon the Gepards will be to Ukraine’s military remains to be seen. Military experts say it’s a complicated weapon that requires months of training (five months, for example, when the romanian army acquired it), a constant stream of spare parts — and ammunition from Switzerland, which the Swiss have not yet agreed to send.
No wonder Ukrainians feel Germany’s heart is not quite in its efforts to arm them with the weapons it desperately and quickly needs.
Yet it’s only just over two months since Scholz made an historic speech to the German parliament which was hailed at the time as a watershed. In an address which lasted just under an hour, as russian armour and troops poured across the border in an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, the recently elected chancellor laid waste to Germany’s long-standing policy of cosying up to the Kremlin.
He promised billions more for defence to end the hollowing out of Germany’s military, support for sanctions against Moscow and even weapons for Ukraine. When he sat down, 16 years of Merkelism — the prorussian approach of his predecessor, Angela Merkel — lay in tatters.
It was all the more remarkable coming from a chancellor whose Social Democrat party had always been in the vanguard of rapprochement with russia — a policy known as Ostpolitik, which dates back to the early 1960s.
Yet in the aftermath of this supposed watershed, Scholz was nowhere to be seen. It was almost as if he’d gone into hiding.
LAter, we learned that he was personally going through the list of weapons Kyiv was requesting to remove every item of heavy equipment that might make a difference in Ukraine’s efforts to repel the russian invasion.
But if Berlin was reluctant to arm Ukraine, it was also in no rush to stop itself funding President Putin’s war machine.
the German government was adamant that there was no question of it not buying russian oil and gas, which means billions continue to pour into the Kremlin’s coffers to pay for the invasion. At one stage Scholz surfaced to say Germany could not ‘go it alone’ on the supply of heavy weapons, which was a strange excuse since other Nato allies were already sending them to Ukraine.
Sympathetic commentators reminded us that Scholz was in coalition with the Greens, who dabbled in pacifism, and had to accommodate the Left of his own party, which still had a soft spot for Ostpolitik despite russian barbarities in Ukraine. But the Greens let it be known they were in favour of sending heavy weapons and the Left kept their heads down. Another pathetic excuse bit the dust.
Germany’s international reputation has taken a terrible battering during this delay and dither. the country has used the 77 years since the defeat of Nazi Germany to become one of the world’s greatest and richest democracies.
But today, across european capitals, admiration has been replaced by exasperation. the loss of political capital in Nato and the european Union is palpable.
Instead of leading from the front, europe’s most powerful country is always bringing up the rear.
Die Welt, one of Germany’s most respected newspapers, calls Scholz’s failure to follow through after his watershed speech as ‘the most dangerous miscalculation in the history of the federal republic’. It’s a crisis for the whole German political establishment, since all of it — Left, right and centre plus big business and trade unions — has been implicated in the sorry mess that Germany’s long-standing complicity with the Kremlin has become.
As perhaps Germany’s most egregious Putin puppet, former chancellor Gerhard Schroder, recently confessed: ‘We were all at it for 30 years.’ As chairman of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, and board director of oil giant rosneft, he has been filling his boots with russian energy company treasure for years — and still is.
the German establishment has been more vociferously critical of Brexit Britain than of Putin’s russia. Now it’s paying the price for its Kremlin complicity. Schroder’s great mate, frank-Walter Steinmeier, is Germany’s head of state. His ties with Moscow are so extensive that Kyiv has declared him persona non grata. Ukraine’s ambassador to Berlin refuses to be in the same room as him.
the contrast between Germany’s political leaders and the female leaders who have been dubbed the five Warrior Women of the North could not be starker — or more refreshing. Denmark, Sweden, finland, estonia and Lithuania are all led by smart, feisty women who’ve been fiercely critical of Putin from even before the invasion and robustly supportive of Ukraine since.
Lithuanian prime minister Ingrida Simonyte plans to end russian gas imports before the year is out, even though it is poorer and far more vulnerable to russian bullying than Germany.
Danish prime minister Mette frederiksen and estonian leader Kaja Kallas hardly preside over military superpowers but both have done more, proportionately, to help Ukraine than Germany.
Swedish prime minister Magdalena Andersson agreed to send Ukraine — and has already delivered — more than 10,000 antitank weapons the moment russia invaded. Her finnish counterpart, the youthful Sanna Marin, has skilfully steered her historically neutral country towards Nato membership.
there are now clear majorities in finland and Sweden for joining Nato. Marin and Andersson will begin the membership process this summer. When it’s completed Sweden and finland will join
Denmark and Norway, already Nato members, in being able to deploy 250 state-of-the-art fighter jets between them on Nato’s northern flank. Sweden will also bring advanced submarine capabilities.
It will be hugely reassuring for the Baltic states. It’s a consequence of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine I doubt he ever foresaw. It’s a significant strengthening of Nato defences where it has been vulnerable.
Germany needs to learn from these Warrior Women of the North. ‘Never again’ has been the German mantra since it escaped from its Nazi past. In the post-war years it has always lived up to that.
BUt today russian soldiers are raping and murdering Ukrainians as they reduce their towns and cities to rubble while Germany still buys the russian oil and gas which pays for Putin’s barbarous capabilities.
the decision to become increasingly reliant on russian hydrocarbons was entirely of Germany’s own making. It was not forced to go down this route. Important voices at home and abroad warned Germany not to do it. they were ignored. It was a terrible mistake with huge geopolitical consequences that are now tragically unfolding for all to see.
even at the cost of some pain — though nothing to what the Ukrainians are enduring — it is incumbent on Germany that it puts matters right, starting with the extensive arming of Ukraine and the speedy implementation of a russian oil and gas embargo.
In a sign that it is finally feeling the heat, on Wednesday Berlin dropped its objection to a full russian oil embargo by the eU — as long as it would be given time to find alternatives to russian supplies.
It was a welcome first step, albeit a begrudging one. Now it must move forward on reducing its dependency on russian gas. Ukraine and the members of Nato deserve no less.
The sonorous Tory MP and handsomely paid barrister Sir Geoffrey Cox has worked hard representing the government of the British Virgin Islands, which is beset with allegations of cronyism and misuse of public money.
But yesterday that lucrative job, which cemented Cox’s position as Britain’s highestearning MP – and saw him escape lockeddown Britain for a luxury villa in the tropical sun – became a little more interesting.
For the premier of the BVI, Andrew Fahie, sensationally faces multi-million dollar drug smuggling and money laundering charges in the US.
Mr Fahie, 51, who has spent months angrily rejecting allegations of corruption in the notorious tax haven, was arrested at Miami airport on Thursday after a sting operation by America’s Drug enforcement Administration.
he was charged with conspiracy to import at least 5kg of a cocaine mixture and conspiracy to launder money. The director of the BVI’s ports, Oleanvine Maynard, and her son Kadeem, were also arrested and charged.
Mr Fahie’s arrest came just a day before a British inquiry into corruption allegations published its own damning findings, recommending a twoyear suspension of the BVI constitution and direct rule by the UK-appointed governor.
‘The people of the BVI have been badly served in recent years. Very badly indeed,’ it said.
But the end of his rule looks like the least of Mr Fahie’s problems. The 19-page prosecution statement released in Florida reads like a script for a hollywood thriller, with speedboats, shell companies, Lebanese hezbollah operatives and an
undercover agent posing as a Mexican cartel member. And at the centre is Mr Fahie, a controversial and polarising politician who, prosecutors say, demanded an upfront payment of $500,000 in cash for helping to smuggle cocaine to Miami and New York, while also complaining to an undercover agent that Britain ‘didn’t pay him much’.
The BVI’s governor, John Rankin, said ‘I realise this will be shocking news for people in the territory’, stressing the US allegations were unconnected with UK commission’s investigation.
however, behind the official horror at the alleged activities of a man elected to govern some 30,000 British citizens, there’s likely to be grim satisfaction in Whitehall at the plight of a Caribbean politician who has been accused of stoking anti-British feeling for political advantage.
When in January 2021, outgoing BVI governor Augustus Jaspert appointed a senior British high Court judge, Sir Gary hickinbottom, to investigate allegations against the BVI government, Mr Fahie accused the UK official of ‘damaging and reckless’ behaviour. Mr Jaspert said he’d discovered evidence suggesting corruption that stretched to the top of the BVI government and even possible involvement with drug traffickers.
US prosecutors maintain that Mr Fahie was brought into the criminal conspiracy after an undercover DeA agent met a group of self-proclaimed members of Lebanon’s terror group hezbollah on the BVI island of Tortola in late 2021.
The agent, posing as a member of the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel, claimed he needed help moving thousands of kilograms of cocaine from Colombia through Tortola, then laundering the proceeds. The hezbollah members suggested he meet both Mr Fahie and Mrs Maynard.
The agent met the latter first, and it is alleged that after he outlined his plan, she told him she was confident Mr Fahie would come on board. ‘You see with my premier, he’s a little crook sometimes… he’s not always straight’, Mrs Maynard allegedly told the agent in a recording.
She and her son Kadeem later said they’d spoken to Mr Fahie, who said he would ‘handle the ports and airports’ but demanded a $500,000 initial payment. he later asked for an extra $38,000 in cash to repay a debt to a mystery Senegalese man who had ‘fixed’ political issues for him.
Mrs Maynard also said Mr Fahie, who was ‘skittish’ because of the UK inquiry, had given her ‘code words’ to use when discussing the plan.
‘You see with my premier, he’s a little crooked sometimes’
The premier snared in £62m cocaine sting — and the Tory grandee who represented his office
When they met in Tortola earlier this month, Mr Fahie allegedly told the undercover agent he was worried about being caught, saying: ‘It took me 20 years to get here and I don’t want to leave in 20 minutes.’
They drove together to a meeting at a ‘large, very nice, stone house’, with Mr Fahie complaining during the journey ‘that the British didn’t pay him much’.
The agent told Mr Fahie his cartel wanted to use Tortola ports to transport 3,000kg of cocaine per shipment. The drugs would be hidden inside 5kg buckets of waterproofing paint, court papers say.
Mr Fahie and Mrs Maynard were allegedly offered 12 per cent of the value of the cocaine sold in America, whereupon the premier pulled out a calculator and worked out that the total would come to $78million, making their cut worth more than $9million.
The agent said he was told that secretive BVI shell companies – of which there are more than 370,000 – could be used to conceal criminal proceeds. According to prosecuMrs tors, the undercover agent also offered to help fund Mr Fahie’s reelection campaign and asked him to allow him to ‘have a hand’ in choosing Mr Fahie’s successor ‘to ensure the continuity of their drug operations’.
He also unveiled a plan to allow BVI police to start occasionally seizing low-quality ‘brown’ cocaine and money to ‘make it look like Mr Fahie was fighting drug-trafficking’. According to the court papers, Mr Fahie laughed and told him he had ‘thought of everything’.
However, the premier was still suspicious and needed reassurance the other man wasn’t an undercover agent. Mr Fahie said ‘the British had been trying for years to get him out of office’, court papers say.
According to the agent, it was agreed that Kadeem would ferry the first shipment in from the neighbouring island of St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands in his speedboat.
His mother explained how they used a corrupt private jet company to bring in drug money.
On Wednesday, the conspiracy allegedly moved to Miami, where the parties met in a hotel and ironed out final details and money arrangements. Mr Fahie, who said he had a friend involved in ‘moving guns and cocaine’, also disclosed that he ‘believed in magic and witches, and how to read lies in people’, prosecutors say.
The following day, it is alleged, the informant took Mr Fahie to the airport and ushered him on to a supposedly BVI-bound private jet containing $700,000 for him and Maynard that had been put into ‘designer shopping bags’. As they left the plane, Mr Fahie was arrested, reportedly asking: ‘Why am I getting arrested, I don’t have any money or drugs?’
As Mr Fahie cools his heels in a US jail cell, his lawyer, Tory politician Sir Geoffrey, moved swiftly yesterday to distance himself from Mr Fahie and to stress that he was not advising him in the US.
The MP for Torridge and West Devon, who was paid more than £1million last year to work as a lawyer for clients including the BVI government, caused outrage after it emerged that, as the rest of the UK lived under Covid lockdown, he flew to the Caribbean and was put up at a £3.1million villa overlooking a secluded bay.
Although Cox was referred to the Commons anti-sleaze watchdog, he denied breaking the rules and it was decided last December that he would not be investigated.
The former Attorney General’s role in advising a controversial administration as it tried to defend itself against allegations from his own Tory Government did him no favours. Yesterday, he released a statement insisting that Mr Fahie ‘is not and has never been my client’.
Instead, he said he was instructed by solicitors Withers to advise various BVI government ministries – including the office of the premier – in connection with a public inquiry that at the time involved ‘no criminal charges of any kind’.
And he reiterated that while a barrister’s job was to give objective legal advice and representation, ‘it implies neither approval nor disapproval of his clients’ conduct’.
The drugs charges will come as little surprise to islands where locals say cocaine-smuggling is rampant and often carried out by those who should be fighting it.
In late 2020, BVI police raided the Tortola home of a fellow officer and found more than £180million worth of cocaine – 2.3 tons, reportedly the largest land-based cocaine seizure in British history.
‘He was offered 12 per cent... he pulled out a calculator’