Jesus. I hope so
Kharkiv blasts from tonight look the scariest. Relentless, 40 or 50 flashes in a ten second period. Possibly thermobaric weapons I’d say.
Instead of hoping there is a new thread where you can come clean
Someone asked
Saw some retired general on fox just there saying the lads who have been shipped to Belarus today are Putin’s closers. Some elite squadron who the general said Putin would not have expected to need them and it’s a big tell
The thing about the swift sanctions on certain banks. A complete stupid move it should have been all of them. These will only target banks associated with Putin .
Germany surely realise they need the gas a lot more than he needs the money? It’s probably a deliberate cop out that sounds impressive and friends in media will sell it as so.
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I suspect that is not true at all.
60% dependency on Russian gas at last count. Germanys energy needs
It’s like Dublin in gaa. That’s why they are struggling so badly recently.
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He read it first on tfk
You’d be surprised what you pick up on that place
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32% says Reuters.
Gas does not make up that much of Germany’s energy needs. Work arounds can be found and we are not far away from the end of the winter.
Putin needs to sell his gas.
Putin also needs the ruble not to tank.
And he needs there not to be bank runs, and commentators are now speculating that’s a significant possibility. If you get bank runs, you get revolutions.
China are circled too its been going on years
Imagine what damage the 10000 US troops in poland would inflict if they could cross the border?
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Meanwhile in Germany
How Olaf Scholz gave Vladimir Putin the green light to invade
Germany’s Chancellor has cut a pitiful figure on the diplomatic stage, conspicuous by his silence in the face of Russian atrocities
ByDaniel Johnson26 February 2022 • 5:00pm
‘Germans, of all people, should know about war, what it is and how it can be prevented’
No sooner had Russian tanks begun rolling across the rivers, plains and steppes of Ukraine than the hand-wringing in the West began. Nowhere has there been more anger, anguish and angst than in Germany.
Even more than the preening vanity of Emmanuel Macron, it was the poker-faced Olaf Scholz who gave Putin the green light to invade. Last week, the German Chancellor flew to Moscow, ostensibly to plead the Ukrainian case at the court of Tsar Vladimir.
That was certainly the impression he gave at a joint press conference afterwards. Yet Scholz returned from his peace mission empty-handed, having instead urged the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to accept Russian demands to negotiate over the so-called separatist republics in Donbas. The Chancellor of Germany, whose economy is several times bigger than Russia’s, had been reduced to the status of Putin’s messenger boy.
One of the first to voice his fury and frustration after Putin declared war was Alfons Mais, the most senior general in the German Army. In an extraordinarily frank outburst, he took to social media on Thursday to lament the way that his political masters had left his troops unprepared and his country defenceless.
“The Bundeswehr, the army that I have the privilege to lead, is more or less stripped bare,” he wrote. “The options that we can offer politicians to support the [Nato] Alliance are extremely limited.”
“This doesn’t feel good,” the exasperated general added. “Ich bin angefressen [I’m sickened]!”
On top of the frustration that every officer in Nato must feel at their inability to hinder the hideous spectacle of the Russian onslaught on Kyiv, Odesa and other great Ukrainian cities, there is an extra reason for a German general to feel a sense of responsibility for this land.
During the Second World War, Ukraine was a scene of armageddon: huge battles involving millions of casualties and appalling atrocities. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, who commanded the German armies there during the decisive phase of the war, was both a military genius and a war criminal.
His British admirers, including Winston Churchill, saw to it that he served only four years of an 18-year sentence for his crimes. Ukrainians are less forgiving, and the German military owes them a debt of honour.
The polar opposite of the Nazi Wehrmacht, the West German Bundeswehr was once the front line of Nato’s defence against the Red Army. In the late Eighties, when I spent a few days with them while serving as The Telegraph’s Bonn correspondent, they impressed me by their professionalism. One officer taught me to shoot.
That generation of German soldiers left me in no doubt that, if Soviet tanks came thundering through the Fulda Gap, the Bundeswehr would have stood and fought. They had the tanks, they had the men and they had the money, too.
Now, evidently, they don’t. Germany is still the richest country in Europe, but its defence spending is just 1.36 per cent of GDP, far below the Nato target of 2 per cent.
A post-Cold War pacifist culture of complacency has undermined military morale. Before moving to Brussels to preside over a series of fiascos as head of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen was a notably undistinguished German defence minister. Her legacy was symbolised by the discovery that troops were so badly equipped that on Nato exercises, they were forced to use broomsticks as rifles.
Even worse than this neglect of the bare necessities of a credible defence has been the all-pervasive pro-Russian attitude of the German elites, even within the military. This was epitomised when the Inspector of the German Navy, Vice-Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach, was forced to resign after telling a think tank audience last month that the idea of a Russian invasion of Ukraine was “nonsense”.
Putin, he said, merely wanted to be treated as an equal: “It is easy to give him the respect he really demands – and probably also deserves.” Crimea, he added, “is gone”, while Ukraine (and Georgia) should be kept out of Nato to placate Russia.
After such a public endorsement of Putin, at a time of delicate negotiations with Moscow, caused dismay among allies and protests from Kyiv, Schönbach jumped before he was pushed. But his views are widely shared within a German political, diplomatic and business establishment that has become inured to Putin’s aggression and dependent on his gas.
In particular, the Russian state energy company Gazprom has acquired a grip over German gas supplies that renders the country vulnerable to blackmail. The Green energy minister, Robert Habeck, admitted last week that Berlin had watched helplessly while Gazprom “systematically” held back supplies at the start of the winter, ensuring that by the time of the invasion, German reserves would be at an all-time low.
Habeck is supposed to be in charge of energy security, yet he seems astonished that not only Germany’s gas supplies but also its reserves are, in effect, controlled by the Kremlin.
Looking back over the Ukrainian debacle, who emerges as the guilty men and women? Leaving the Kremlin aside, high on the list of Western culprits come the last three German chancellors: Gerhard Schröder, Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz.
Especially when compared with their postwar predecessors – European statesmen such as Adenauer, Brandt, Schmidt and Kohl – this trio of mediocrities deserve to hang their heads in ignominy. By toadying to Putin, neglecting Nato and feeding the German addiction to Russian energy, each one has betrayed Ukraine and jeopardised Europe.
The most obviously Russophile German leader was Gerhard Schröder, the Social Democrat chancellor from 1998 to 2005. The son of a Nazi soldier who was killed on the Eastern front, he internalised the guilt of his generation and has ended up as a Kremlin stooge; Schröder went to work for Gazprom within weeks of leaving office.
He has vigorously promoted the Nord Stream Baltic pipeline project, designed to increase Europe’s dependency on Russian energy. In recent months, Schröder has lobbied for Nord Stream 2, which would avoid the need to pump gas across Ukraine. In the face of Russian atrocities, Schröder has been conspicuous by his silence.
His successor, Angela Merkel, dominated German and indeed European politics for 16 years, only stepping down last December. As an East German and a fluent Russian speaker, she showed a combination of deference and wariness towards Moscow. It was characteristic that Putin exploited her fear of dogs by bringing his huge black Labrador to their meeting in 2007.
Disastrously, Mrs Merkel fed the German addiction to Russian gas by closing down the country’s nuclear industry. She worked hard to keep Germany as Russia’s biggest trading partner. While vocal on human rights, she was reluctant to do anything that might antagonise Putin, averse to sanctions after such outrages as the 2014 annexation of Crimea or 2018’s Salisbury poisonings.
While enjoying the limelight as “the world’s most powerful woman”, Mrs Merkel utterly failed to complete the task of German reunification by inculcating Western values among her fellow East Germans, allowing both far-Left and far-Right parties to flourish. Lacking any discernible beliefs of her own, she presided over the transformation of Germany from the instinctively pro-Western country I remember from 40 or 50 years ago into the fence-sitting, soft-centred, moralistic yet mercenary society it now is.
As finance minister in the Merkel coalition from 2018 until he succeeded her as Chancellor last year, Olaf Scholz was an enthusiastic supporter of this surreptitious appeasement of Putin. So it is no surprise that until this weekend he was one of the chief opponents of kicking Russia out of the Swift international payments system – a sanction that would really damage Putin’s prestige.
Scholz has cut a pitiful figure on the diplomatic stage, refusing even to mention Nord Stream 2 while sitting next to Joe Biden and leaving it to the President to declare that the pipeline project was as good as dead, but he left it until the eve of the invasion to endorse the US position. The German company that has built Nord Stream will now be sanctioned – but only by the Americans. The assumption must be that Scholz’s foot-dragging is due to the persistent influence in his party of its former leader, Schröder.
The reason why Berlin’s self-abasement matters so much is that the Russo-German relationship is, and always has been, crucial to peace between East and West. Bismarck, the master of realpolitik, famously defined the secret of politics: “Make a good treaty with Russia.”
But there is a difference between the Cold War policies of detente and Ostpolitik, designed to pre-empt the genocidal conflicts of the first half of the 20th century that had been so catastrophic for both sides, and allowing Germany to become the Kremlin’s best client in Putin’s protection racket. For a generation or more, the political class in Berlin has been living a lie.
For a handful of German grandees, the invasion of Ukraine has been a moment of truth. One politician who has abruptly come clean is Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who was once designated by Merkel to succeed her as Chancellor. As Putin’s panzers converged on Kyiv, she tweeted her mea culpa: “I’m so angry at ourselves for our historical failure. After Georgia, Crimea and Donbas, we have not prepared anything that would have really deterred Putin.”
The former defence minister added: “We have forgotten the lesson of [Helmut] Schmidt and [Helmut] Kohl that negotiation always comes first, but we have to be militarily strong enough to make non-negotiation not an option for the other side.”
Chancellor Scholz had not only refused to send weapons to the Ukrainians until this weekend, but prohibited allies, such as the Baltic states, from supplying them with German-made arms. He even banned the RAF from using German airspace to send anti-tank missiles. This pernicious policy of denying essential defensive weapons to Ukraine, while supplying Russia with large quantities of dual-purpose military equipment, enjoyed support across the German political spectrum.
One senior German politician who broke ranks on this was Norbert Röttgen, the chairman of the Bundestag Foreign Affairs Committee: “I was against arms deliveries [to Ukraine] in order to keep channels of communication with Moscow. That’s over for now. What matters now is defence. Whatever weapons we can provide, we must deliver to Ukraine.” For the brave defenders of Kyiv and Kharkiv, however, such U-turns come far too late.
Zelensky himself, whose family is now being targeted by sinister Russian “sabotage groups” and Spetsnaz units, was very clear about his contempt for Western appeasers when he addressed the Munich Security Conference a week before the invasion. For the Ukrainian President, this is literally a matter of life and death: to compromise on his country’s democracy and sovereignty is out of the question. For his German “frenemies”, such as Scholz, it seems that doing business with Putin and his oligarchs is no less important than Ukraine’s independence.
Yet, as the prospect of war in Europe has come steadily closer in recent weeks, the German establishment has been visibly panicking. For people who have invested their entire intellectual and financial capital in “the European idea”, both literally and metaphorically, the invasion of one major European state by another is the end of their world. The failure to bribe, beg or cajole Putin into playing by the “rules-based international order” is more than just a disillusionment for the German elite. Their lives have lost their meaning – irrevocably.
To appreciate the state of shock that has befallen Berlin, one must reach far back into German history. After the catastrophic religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, the Peace of Westphalia established the modern system of nation states. Then in 1740, the new Prussian King Frederick II invaded the mineral-rich province of Silesia (then Austrian, now in Poland), leading to three wars with the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa lasting until 1763. That ultimately successful land-grab not only secured Frederick his sobriquet “the Great”, but dealt a lasting blow to conventional ideas about relations between monarchies.
Napoleon filled the resulting vacuum of legitimacy with the ideology of a revolutionary empire. Half a century later, Bismarck upended Europe again, in the cause of German unification. The 20th century saw two world wars, both initiated by the Germans. They bequeathed death and destruction on a continental scale. A third war was prevented only by the fear of global annihilation.
The Cold War division of Europe froze that conflict until the fateful night in East Berlin of November 9 1989. I was there for The Telegraph, and asked the final question at a Central Committee press conference that earned a place in history by its unintended consequence. My question was: “What will happen now to the Berlin Wall?” The answer came back a few hours later: it was first opened, then demolished. The people voted with their feet for the fall of the Wall. After so many wars that had begun or ended on their soil, at last the Germans had done something of which they could be proud.
Fast forward nearly 33 years, and from an embattled Kyiv comes the voice of a president of democratic Ukraine declaring that “a new iron curtain […] has come down and is closing Russia off from the civilised world”. Zelensky is right, of course, and also right to add that “our national task is to make sure that this curtain does not fall across our land”.
Imagine how these words must sound to any educated German with the slightest historical sensibility. In effect, Zelensky is declaring that the fall of the Berlin Wall, the greatest moment in German history, has now been reversed. A Ukrainian, who also belongs to a Jewish family that suffered in the Holocaust, is reminding the Germans that they have failed to protect his people. They have allowed the European past to return with a vengeance.
How does a nation redeem itself? Over three generations, the Germans have certainly tried to do so. But the European project, in which they invested their hopes, was predicated on the idea that we live in a benign world in which the Kantian dream of global government and perpetual peace is close to being realised. Putin has reminded us all, but especially the Germans, that we actually inhabit a warlike, Hobbesian world in which man-made thunderbolts can rain down without warning from a clear sky.
A fortnight ago, as he stopped off in Kyiv en route to Moscow, Olaf Scholz did not listen to his host. The big guy was too busy lecturing the little guy about what concessions he should make to the even bigger guy in Moscow. Perhaps the German Chancellor will listen more carefully next time – if there is a next time.
“If you don’t help us now,” says Zelensky, “tomorrow the war will knock on your door.” Germans, of all people, should know about war, what it is and how it can be prevented. History has given them a second chance. What if the bright promise that opened with the fall of the Berlin Wall should be closed again with the fall of Kyiv?
Daniel Johnson is editor of thearticle.com
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