Did Germany Inadvertently Encourage Putin's War?

• Author: Engelen, Klaus C.

When Vladimir Putin twice in two days addressed his citizens about his intended offensive actions in Ukraine, for Germans the horrible writing was on the wall.

In the early hours of February 24, 2022, when the Russian president announced a "special military operation" against Ukraine, he in effect launched the biggest attack in Europe by one state against another since Germany's Adolf Hitler sent his troops into Poland in 1939, triggering World War II.

The first German government reaction on that fateful morning came from Foreign Affairs Minister Annalena Baerbock, declaring on Twitter: "We woke up in a different world today." She warned that Putin "will pay a high price for his invasion of the Ukraine." Baerbock had delivered the same warning to Moscow on January 18, 2022, when she met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reacted on Twitter more coolly. "The situation is serious. The peace in Europe is built on not changing borders. We must return to these principles: State sovereignty is respected. Borders will not be moved."

Representing Russia's most important trading partner, Scholz flew to Moscow on February 15 to meet with Putin in a high-stakes last-ditch effort to avoid war. He was able to talk with Putin for three hours, but returned without hopeful signs of avoiding the coming tragedy.

So far, there has been total silence from former chancellor Angela Merkel regarding Putin's war against Ukraine. For sixteen years, Merkel led four coalition governments under which Germany's energy dependence on Russia was allowed to grow to extreme levels, and Putin's military buildup and aggressions beyond Russia's borders were ignored. This happened, of course, with the help of Merkel's Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, and her coalition partners, especially the Social Democrats and to a lesser extent the Liberals. But Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who led Merkel's CDU and served as Minister of Defense from 2019 to 2021, vented her anger and frustration in a tweet with remarkable openness: "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."

A [euro]100 BILLION DEFENSE FUND

Three days after Putin's war against Ukraine started, Scholz, in a special session of the Bundestag, proclaimed a Zeitenwende, in the sense of a historic shift. The Russian invasion of Ukraine shattered many fundamental convictions of German politics, including "change through trade" (Wandel durch Handel), which had prevailed for decades. In a dramatic about-face, Scholz pledged massive increases in financial resources to be used for modernizing the German military. As chancellor of the "traffic light" coalition of Social Democrats, Greens, and Liberals, he vowed to commit [euro]100 billion to new defense funding and exceed a NATO-wide annual spending goal of 2 percent of GDP. These moves to rebuild the country's armed forces would require an "unprecedented joint effort" and would help establish Germany as a reliable and capable partner with an appropriate role in the NATO alliance.

This means that under Scholz, who served as finance minister in the last Merkel administration, Berlin's current yearly military spending of about [euro]50 billion, or around 1.5 percent of GDP, would increase. "It would be more than 2 percent," assured Scholz.

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