Germany: The weak spot in Europe’s support for Ukraine
Lurching from one foreign policy scandal to another, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is undermining his country’s reliability as a NATO ally, said Marco Seliger in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland). His “cascade of mishaps” started two weeks ago, when he revealed a military secret: that Britain had troops in Ukraine to help the Ukrainians use British and French cruise missiles. He let that slip as part of his argument that Germany didn’t need to send Kyiv its own Taurus cruise missiles—and then had the gall to “publicly denounce the French for not supplying enough weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.” The “low point” came when Russia was able to easily intercept and publish the audio of a German military conference call, in which German officers discussed NATO secrets, because one of the officers had dialed in from an unsecured hotel line. NATO allies are fed up, with French President Emmanuel Macron muttering darkly about “cowards” and former British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace calling Scholz “the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time.” At this point, the chancellor seems to be helping Russian President Vladimir Putin in his plan to “drive a wedge through Europe.”
Germany is becoming the “weakest link in NATO’s campaign to save Ukraine,” said The Times (U.K.) in an editorial. The Taurus standoff has confirmed growing concerns about “the footdragging and incompetence” of Scholz’s government. Germany has 600 Taurus missiles; it could easily afford to send a quarter of them to Kyiv. Scholz’s stated reason for not doing that—to avoid provoking Moscow—reads as “unearned respect for President Putin” and amounts to abandonment of Kyiv. What happened to the Zeitenwende, or historical turning point, that Scholz declared right after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine? He claimed then that Germany had entered a new era and would spend dramatically on defense and support Ukraine, but he “has struggled to deliver.”
That’s because Scholz, like most Germans, has a “deep-seated fear of Russia,” said Matthew Karnitschnig in Politico
.eu (Belgium). Having fought two wars with Russia in the 20th century, both of which left Germany in rubble, Berlin now won’t do anything that might provoke Moscow. But there’s also a strange strain of sympathy for Russia, thanks to the postwar division of Germany. For many of those Germans who grew up in communist East Germany, “Russia is still regarded as more of a friend than a foe.” And even Germans from the west of the country believe that the Cold War ended not because Ronald Reagan was tough on the Soviets but because Germany pursued a “strategy of engagement” with them. That’s why, even now, Scholz “refuses to say he wants Ukraine to win”—he says only that he doesn’t want it to lose. Yet the Ukrainians say that without Germany’s Taurus missiles, they could in fact lose, and soon, said Gerhard Gnauck in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany). For them, “possession of Taurus is an existential issue.” They need to use them to blow up the Kerch Bridge that connects Russia to occupied Crimea and supplies the Russian invaders. The longer Scholz delays, says Ukrainian diplomat Andrij Melnyk, the more “Ukrainians pay with their lives.”