Kremlin’s ‘double cross’ over deal to free fighters in steelworks stronghold
RUSSIA has been accused of double crossing Ukraine as officials moved to pull back on an agreement to free captured troops from the Azovstal steelworks.
Moscow had agreed to exchange hundreds of members of the Azov Regiment – the Ukrainian unit holed up in the Soviet-era steel mill – in a prisoner swap earlier this week.
However Russia’s parliament has now announced it will vote on a resolution to ‘prevent the exchange of Nazi war criminals’ today – with some members calling for the Azov troops to be executed.
Ukraine’s deputy defence minister Hanna Malyar dismissed the threats as ‘internal propaganda’, adding that ‘an exchange procedure will take place’ as Kyiv abandons the steelworks after more than 80 days.
But experts have decried the move as ‘underhand’ and claimed it could scupper Ukraine’s bid to free the 600 soldiers – some of whom are still at the plant in Mariupol.
There are at least 250 Azov fighters who were evacuated on Monday, some of whom were seriously wounded. Seven buses carrying an unknown number of Ukrainian troops also left the plant last night.
But all of them remain inside Russianoccupied Ukrainian territory.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of Russia’s parliament, insisted Azov members should be excluded from any prisoner exchange deal. He added: ‘They are war
‘Could derail a prisoner swap’
criminals, and we must do everything to bring them to justice.’
He has ordered the defence and security committees to prepare draft legislation to that effect, according to a post on the Russian parliament’s website.
Fellow MP Leonid Slutsky, a Russian negotiator in stalled peace talks with Ukraine, branded the evacuated troops ‘animals in human form’ and called for them to be tried and executed.
‘They do not deserve to live after the monstrous crimes against humanity that they have committed and that are committed continuously against our prisoners,’ the politician added.
In a statement released late last night, Russian investigators vowed to interrogate Ukrainian fighters to identify them and ‘check their involvement in crimes committed against civilians’.
But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed that President Vladimir Putin had guaranteed that the fighters who surrendered would be treated ‘in accordance with international standards.’
Vladislav Davidzon, a Russia expert at the Atlantic Council think-tank, said: ‘A change to the law by Russian MPs could derail any prisoner swap. It shows just how underhand Putin and his cronies are in the dishonourable way they wage war.’
Most civilians in the plant have been freed over the past few weeks after the UN and the Red Cross brokered a deal with Russia and Ukraine. Those who got out spoke of the squalid conditions in the bunkers with a lack of sunlight, food, and proper medication.
Some even lost teeth due to starvation or stress, as Moscow’s forces continued to pound the area with missiles and bombs.
The Azovstal plant is a foursquare mile complex that includes a maze of tunnels and bunkers which are designed to survive a nuclear blast.
It was held by the Azov Regiment for more than two months – and they became national heroes after being forced into a desperate last stand. The unit was formed in 2014 as an extreme right-wing volunteer militia to fight Russian-backed separatists who had taken control of parts of the Donbas.
The largely Russian-speaking industrial heartland of eastern Ukraine is where Russia says it wants to end Ukrainian rule and claim the region as its own.
Tensions are set to rise further between Kyiv and Moscow next week when Russian judges rule on whether to classify the Azov Regiment as a ‘terrorist organisation.’ The country’s supreme court is set to hear the case on May 26.
SENIOR politicians from all over the Western world have visited Ukraine in recent weeks. Boris Johnson took part in one of the most memorable foreign visits of his prime ministership when he walked around central Kyiv with President Zelensky last month, while UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and EU Commission Chief Ursula von der Leyen have also shown the free world’s support for an embattled democracy.
Yet one senior Western politician has been strangely silent on a potential visit to Ukraine: Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz. And why might that be? Scholz, like many in Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), presents himself as a mild-mannered technocrat, and a pragmatist on the party’s centre-Right. But he has a surprising political past.
At the beginning of his political career, Scholz — who grew up in Hamburg in what was then West Germany — was not only a convinced Marxist but also an ardent follower of the so-called ‘peace movement’. This portrayed Nato and America as irresponsible warmongers. On many security issues, he openly sided with the Kremlin.
Firebrand
In 1982, when Scholz became deputy leader of the Young Socialists, the Cold War was at its height and the prospect of a nuclear exchange between Moscow and the West seemed all too possible.
In December 1979, Soviet troops had invaded Afghanistan and the Kremlin had refocused hundreds of intermediate-range nuclear missiles on Western Europe.
Nato countered this by stationing its own U.S. missiles in Europe, with the support and encouragement of then West German Chancellor and SPD leader Helmut Schmidt.
What did the firebrand young Scholz have to say about this? In essays and speeches, he savaged the ‘aggressive-imperialist Nato strategy’ and its ‘Right-wing’ supporters in his own centre-Left party.
Like many young Marxists in the West, Scholz saw Nato and the U.S. as the main enemy and threat to peace — and not the USSR.
That is why, as has been established, he actively ‘collaborated’ with East German politicians and functionaries in the struggle between East and West.
Scholz is known to have travelled regularly to the GDR — the so-called ‘German Democratic Republic’, not that there was anything democratic about the Soviet satellite also known as East Germany. Remarkably, he crossed the border a total of nine times between September 1983 and June 1988.
The GDR border authorities were always instructed to free Scholz from ‘forced exchange’ — the money Western visitors handed over which amounted to a border tax — and to give him a ‘particularly preferred, polite clearance’.
At this time ordinary West Germans crossing the border to see relatives, as I did, not only had to hand over money but were routinely harassed by border guards, and often followed by secret agents from the much-feared Stasi. Yet Scholz was given the redcarpet treatment by the East German leadership.
I have found pivotal documents in Germany’s Federal Archives that show how Scholz allied himself far more strongly with the Kremlin’s policy during the 1980s than with that of the U.S. or the West German government.
In one set of documents, the leader of East Germany’s youth branch, the FDJ, noted that Scholz belonged to a Marxist-oriented group that was often willing to ‘co-operate with Communists’.
In his own party’s youth wing, Jusos, Scholz became an unofficial spokesman for the minority of radical Marxists, railing against ‘reformists’ — non-Marxists — in speeches and essays.
On two visits, Scholz was received by the second most important functionary in the GDR, Egon Krenz. In a GDR news programme, you can see Scholz — still with his mop of red hair — sitting opposite Krenz.
Shockingly, Jusos argued that the Soviet Union should ‘put many more nuclear missiles on the doorstep of the United States’.
Olaf Scholz has never mentioned publicly his close relationships to East German functionaries who — just like Vladimir Putin today — led a police state ruled by fear.
Missiles
In October 1986, Scholz and his Jusos friends were back in East Germany to meet their Communist counterparts. Once again, Krenz received them and Scholz himself took a leading part in making a final agreement, in which the Communists’ demand to treat the GDR as no longer a part of Germany, was adopted.
Over the next two years of visits, Scholz and Jusos returned to East Germany to lobby against Nato. They criticised particularly U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s plan for a defensive ‘shield’ against Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles.
In March 1987, it was planned that Scholz should even meet Erich Honecker, the head of the GDR, at a conference.
During this time, the Stasi was viciously cracking down on opposition in the GDR. In January 1988, more than 100 civil rights activists were arrested and some expatriated.
What did Scholz have to say? He emphasised ‘moderate treatment of recent events in the GDR’ when he met his Communist counterparts. And he reiterated his desire to further develop good relations ‘without cyclical strains’.
At another event in June 1988 — just months before the downfall of the USSR — the heavily militarised GDR presented itself as a state devoted to peace in front of participants from 113 countries.
Scholz was treated almost like a state guest: a Central Committee employee picked him up by car at the border.
When I first wrote about Scholz’s youthful collaboration with leading GDR functionaries, several German media outlets refused to publish the revelations. Later, many reported that he had been a victim of the Stasi, pointing to his name appearing in a couple of documents.
Scholz himself reacted to these reports: ‘Of course, I am aware of the fact that I was spied on. It’s not pretty, but that’s how it is.’
In reality, the Stasi documents simply record Scholz’s name when he attended meetings. The Stasi never opened a special file on Scholz, as it did with the many unfortunate people it actually targeted.
Of course, these events took place a long time ago. Not only has Scholz’s appearance changed since then, no doubt so have his political views.
What has remained unchanged since the 1980s, however, is the imperialist mentality inside the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin, like his Soviet predecessors, seeks to deny Russia’s neighbours the right to self-determination.
Kremlin
Shamefully, many senior members of the SPD were willing to tolerate this for decades — most notably the former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who is also chairman of the supervisory boards of two Russian state-owned companies and is due to join the Russian gas giant Gazprom’s supervisory board next month.
It was Schröder who began working with the East German youth branch in 1980 as chairman of the Jusos. Scholz followed in his footsteps. Scholz may have travelled far across the political spectrum — but he cannot escape his past as one of the Kremlin’s ‘useful idiots’.
And today, while the German Chancellor sits on his hands — failing to deliver on his promise of two weeks ago to send heavy weapons to Ukraine — Putin must be rubbing his hands with glee.