The three-plus-one allies delivered the bare minimum to the Ukrainian president on Thursday. A simple consideration makes this clear: Had the four heads of state and government not even granted Ukraine membership status, they might as well have demanded its capitulation to Russia.
It’s no wonder that Putin and his family react so casually and mockingly to this photo opportunity, which supposedly should have been so much more. But he wasn’t. And Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyj also made a good face to the Pepita-Kleine Karo game – what else should he have done than to be happy on camera?
Selenskyj is dependent on everything, absolutely everything, that the West can provide him with. The West means above all: the USA. If Ukraine were dependent on help from the West alone, it would already be Russian. Here is a simple fact: Without the American anti-missiles, Ukraine would not have been able to defend Kyiv at the beginning of the war, or at least not as successfully. And Russia’s Blitzkrieg scenario would have worked.
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Straight to Scholz. But first of all: The Italian Prime Minister moved on the border of ridiculousness. Mario Draghi said in view of the wheat war that Russia has now started in Ukraine, the Europeans must now be as brave as Ukraine.
Hell, what does Signore Draghi want to do now: send the European army to blow up the Russian ships that are blocking the delivery of Ukrainian grain to Africa and Asia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the Black Sea off Odessa? Unfortunately, unfortunately: the European army does not exist. Which again, maybe even in two years, if the American President should be called Donald Trump again, could still grow into an existential European problem. So what is he proposing to us, Mr. Draghi?
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In any case: The three old westerners plus the new westerner Romania talked intensively about Vladimir Putin’s war scenario with Selenskyj, the would-be westerner. No wonder: Russia has good cards to impose its view of things in Africa and Asia – that the West is responsible for the threatening famine there – and not Russia.
Romania is now to become a kind of global hub for the breadbasket Ukraine and its deliveries to the world. This is the only unexpected result of this summit meeting in Kyiv. With its own Black Sea ports, the Ukrainian Odessa is to be bypassed, previously the wheat gateway to the world.
Thank goodness the three hesitant Germany, Italy and France asked their Romanian colleagues to join them. It was probably Emmanuel Macron who came up with this idea, he visited Klaus Johannis on Friday. At least one of the three seems to have realized that if only the Zoeger trio had traveled to Ukraine from the old west, it would have been a fatal signal.
The new West, i.e. the old East with the central power Poland as its most important representative, would certainly have taken it as a diplomatic affront if there had not been a representative from the East. Germany and France have long ceased to be the navel of the Europeans. Here, too, the Ukraine war led to what the German head of government likes to call a “turning point”. The Ukraine war has made the EU more easterly.
Speaking of Olaf Scholz: He has now extended the term drawn to the Bundeswehr and its plus 100 billion future to the war. A little rhetorical coup. This is by no means a “turning point”: Ukraine once had associated status with the EU. That was exactly what prompted Putin to strike at Ukraine for the first time.
Viewed in the light of day, EU accession status is a necessary condition for Ukraine’s existence as a member of the European Union. But status alone is not sufficient for accession. The only decisive factor is the acquis of the European Union – the so-called acquis communautaire. In other words, everything that is now European law. A few thousand pages.
Serbia has now been waiting for accession for almost 20 years. And before Ukraine becomes a member of the European club, many years will pass, who knows how many. And depending on how this war ends in the end, the matter of accession status will have been settled again.
That is, if Putin’s squad of soldiers wins this dirty war. And then possibly installed an Erich Honecker in the Russian vassal state of Ukraine. This brings us back to the beginning, meaning: without weapons, everything is nothing. Without military success, the prospect of Ukraine’s membership of the European Union is an empty promise.
And in this regard, Olaf Scholz did not bring anything with him to Ukraine, contrary to what he once pompously promised before a conceivable trip. You only have to put the – even only announced – German arms deliveries next to the list that Ukraine recently published as the minimum necessary. There are many bureaucratic and some key political reasons for Germany’s hesitation. But the bottom line is: What the Germans deliver remains a tragedy.
Domestically speaking: This visit to Ukraine, which was delayed for all sorts of flimsy reasons and is now finally delayed, will relieve Scholz, who has long been under pressure.
For a day, for two days, for three?
