Ukraine’s leading English-language state media outlet has traduced Germany’s political class, including Angela Merkel and the sitting Chancellor and President, as bearing “collective responsibility” for having “effectively encouraged” Russian aggression.
The Ukrinform article, also published by POLITICO, pulls no punches from the opening bell, observing that “Germany is no stranger to the wrong side of history” before launching into a potted history of the leading European Union member-state’s relations with Russia under Vladimir Putin.
Declaring that “Merkel’s soft-shoe approach to Russia — which reached its zenith with the 2015 decision to green light the Nord Stream 2 pipeline despite Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its role in the separatist war in eastern Ukraine — didn’t just open the door for Putin to go further, it effectively encouraged him to do so”, author Matt Karnitschnig predicted that the former Chancellor has already “earn[ed] a place in the pantheon of political naiveté alongside Neville Chamberlain,” the British prime minister who tried to appease Adolf Hitler to stave off the Second World War.
Karnitschnig went on in the state media outlet to say that the current crisis was “not just a repudiation of Merkel’s chancellorship, however, but of a whole generation of German politicians from across the spectrum” — acidly observing that “Germany’s collective responsibility” cannot be mitigated by the presence of a “Churchill-like figure in German politics who has been warning for years of the perils of trusting Putin” — because there isn’t one.
“[T]he truth is that Germany’s entire political class is guilty,” he charged, noting that current chancellor Olaf Scholz — who served as Vice-Chancellor under Merkel in one of Germany’s so-called “grand coalitions” of notionally right-wing and left-wing parties — had “championed… never-ending ‘dialogue'” with Putin, and that his Social Democratic Party was “the driving force behind the Nord Stream pipelines”.
President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, also of the Social Democrats, was also accused of having “argued almost until the first shots were fired on Ukrainians that Germany should use energy as a way to build bridges with Russia.”
The junior partners in the current “traffic light” coalition government of the Social Democrats, Greens, and Free Democrats — whose traditional party colour is yellow — did not escape criticism either, with the Karnitschnig suggesting the Greens’ record of opposition to Nord Stream 2 had more to do with climate change than geopolitics and blasting its “steadfast opposition to arms deliveries to Kyiv, which only changed after the fighting started.”
Free Democrat leader Christian Lindner, meanwhile, was upbraided over reports that he told Ukrainian ambassador Andrij Melnyk that there was little point in discussing booting Russia out of the SWIFT payments system or revising Germany’s policy on weapons shipments after the Russian invasion because, he erroneously believed, Ukraine only had a “few hours” before it was conquered.
“It was the worst conversation in my life,” Melnyk said.
“From Germany’s veto of NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia in 2008 to its pursuit of gas deals with Moscow to its resistance to send arms to Kyiv — the country’s leaders have served as Putin’s useful idiots,” Karnitschnig concluded, suggesting that few in Ukraine would be persuaded by the EU member’s “foxhole conversion” on the topic of lethal aid and sanctions, warning that, already “pillaged by Germany during World War II,” Ukrainians “certainly won’t forgive and forget” now.
One figure who escaped condemnation, however, was Gerhard Schröder, a two-time Chancellor of Germany for the Social Democratic Party who approved Nord Stream while in office and, after leaving office, was appointed to it as a board member, in addition to other lucrative jobs with Russian companies.