Just three weeks after Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany would directly arm Ukraine, Europe’s economic powerhouse is running out of weapons to send. ‘We’re delivering Stingers. We’re delivering Strelas. The Defence Minister has looked at what we can deliver but honesty also requires us to say: we don’t have enough,’ Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock told the Bundestag last week. ‘If we could conjure up more weapons to send, then we would.’
Scholz then appeared to revert to an old German habit: trumpeting the importance of diplomacy as an end in itself. In the very same tweet in which he thanked Ukraine’s war-time President Volodymyr Zelensky for his speech to the Bundestag last week, he said that Germany was committed to giving ‘diplomacy a chance to end the war’. There was nothing on what concessions might be demanded from Russia. Now reports suggest German officials are keen to pause the ramping up of sanctions on Russia to ‘review the effect of the sanctions imposed so far’.
Germany has historically been more likely than most European powers to cede to Putin’s demands. A pre-invasion poll in February found that 51 per cent of Germans were in favour of a Nato ‘security guarantee’ to Russia to avoid further escalation. Although not explicitly spelt out in the poll, in practice this would have meant barring Ukraine from ever becoming an alliance member. Nato countries had already unanimously rejected one such Russian demand that Ukraine be banned in January. Normal Germans feel an almost pathological aversion to war, while the former GDR retained a pro-Russian psychology decades after the Berlin Wall fell. There is also a more immediate concern: Germany is perhaps more exposed to disruptions of Russian gas than any other major European nation.
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