Anything heroic is alien to Germany and the Germans, and even more: suspicious. Just like everything patriotic, not to mention national. All the more astonishing is a sentence that the Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on German TV. He would probably never get off the lips of his counterpart Annalena Baerbock.
Dmytro Kuleba is an educated man, doctor of law, author of numerous treatises on international law. The Ukrainian Foreign Minister is experienced in diplomacy and an exceptional communicator. Who said on Sunday evening: If the West no longer supplies enough weapons, “then we will fight with shovels”.
Would it be conceivable that his German counterpart Annalena Baerbock would say such a sentence in such a case? Or finance minister Christian Lindner? Or the cool Chancellor Olaf Scholz? Or CDU leader Friedrich Merz – who is already considered by many to be the epitome of a political hype boxer? Hardly likely.
Anything heroic is alien to Germany and the Germans, and even more: suspicious. Just like everything patriotic, not to mention the national – right-wing extremism is often suspected in this complex of topics.
Now save articles for later in “Pocket”.
During his visit to Ukraine, Olaf Scholz expressed his “respect” for the costly struggle against Vladimir Putin’s marauding soldiers. It sounded strange. Scholz and respect for a heroic stand by force of arms, man against man, more precisely: one man against 10 to 15 men?
One of the great paradoxes of this war is that Putin denied Ukraine any identity as an independent nation. And if it wasn’t Ukraine by February 24th, now it certainly is: one nation. More precisely: a non-Russian nation. More specifically: a non-Russian nation heading west.
The Ukrainian nation building through the war is the greatest humiliation for Putin. With its becoming a nation, Ukraine is giving the Russians the finger.
Which just goes to show that the recommendation, most recently by French President Emmanuel Macron, who has since been plucked, that one should not “humiliate” Putin is not only arrogant, but also completely lacking in empathy. If anyone in Europe deserves enough humiliation right now, it must be Putin, the war criminal who, if he could, would also like to “humiliate” France. However, that doesn’t give up his neo-colonialist ideology – according to his taste, there are probably too few Russians living in France.
Why does Putin’s ethnographic claim according to the motto: “everywhere where Russians live, there is Russia” not catch on for France. Now the Ukraine war has taught us that this fascist ideology no longer even makes an impression on “brothers”.
What could possibly be dangerous for Putin himself: after all, Russia itself is a “federation”, a multi-ethnic state. And in Moscow, after all, they’ve had the experience that things that supposedly belong together can also fall apart.
The relationship between Germany and the Ukraine is, perhaps one could say: dazzling. At least not clearly. The Ukraine was always something that neither politicians nor business leaders nor my history teachers at high school took seriously as an independent entity. Most of the time, a Ukrainian existence outside of a Russian context was not even noticed.
You weren’t even taught that in politics school. We, political students, learned a lot about the Nazi atrocities, but not that the greatest human sacrifices were made in the Ukraine and not in Russia. First the butcher Stalin attacked Ukraine, then the butcher Hitler.
Actually, we Germans should have a lot of understanding for Ukraine becoming a nation. “Germany” once consisted of more than 300 sovereign individual states – after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. And to form a single state out of it, this idea only became popular a good 150 years later. So when we look at the diverse Ukraine – have we suppressed our own checkered history?
The history of Ukraine in one sentence: emerged 1000 years ago from Kievan Rus, Lithuanian and Polish formed 300 years later by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland, then by the Grand Duchy of Moscow and the Habsburg Empire, briefly independent, then Soviet, since 30 years now sovereign. Current status: to be wiped out.
Add to that the plurality of denominations, Russian and Ukrainian orthodoxy, Judaism – at the end of the 19th century there were no more Jews in Europe than on Ukrainian territory: five million. The Eastern Europe historian Karl Schlögel calls the Ukraine a “laboratory of border landscapes” or: “A Europe on a small scale.” If the small European aspires to become part of the large European, that makes sense.
Should the heads of state and government of the European Union now give Ukraine accession status to the West Club, there is more to it than symbolic politics. It would be the recognition of this country as an independent state independent of Russia.
But that’s not all: the states of the European Union do not act out of an ethical obligation, they do not distribute a morale bonus for bravery in war. They act in their respective national interests. There is no such thing as a sui generis European interest, no matter how much Ursula von der Leyen might wish that as President of the Brussels Commission.
The European interest in Ukraine’s admission results from the sum of national interests – that’s why everyone has to say yes, or: it’s enough if someone says no.
Giving Ukraine accession status remains problematic; in short: because neither the Ukraine nor the European Union is ready to join. But there is also another geostrategic reason that speaks for Ukraine:
She is currently stopping an emperor who wants to subjugate not only Donbass and not “only” all of Ukraine. Instead, it is stated that he wants to put the rest of Europe in a subject status.
And for that reason alone, Claudia Major from the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik is right, a European perspective for Ukraine, including more consistent military aid from Germany, is “in our own security policy interest”.
If Dmytro Kuleba first has to defend his country with a shovel, it will be too late.
