Earlier I transferred football dates to the calendar. Union will play at Hertha on April 9th, followed by Frankfurt on the following Sunday. Religious commitments, the rest is secondary. My clan thinks it’s antisocial, but that’s how fans tick. Certainly they had already blocked last Monday evening in Kharkiv months ago: “Aunt Olga is celebrating her birthday? Isn’t that also possible after the season?” The local first division club FK Metalist should have played against Poltava at half past six local time. It was in the stadium that Mario Gómez scored two goals against the Netherlands at Euro 2012. But instead of a result from the day before yesterday, the “Kicker” statistic says succinctly: “Sick.” If reports of injured players came now, nobody would think of torn ligaments.
It pulled all the strength out of his bones, says Matthias Platzeck. like a disease. Brandenburg’s former prime minister is a war victim, albeit extremely far down in the hierarchy. It remains to be seen whether he is as innocent as those who are now literally falling on their heads in Kharkiv. Platzeck always promoted communication and understanding. Now it looks as if that was fundamentally wrong. Others may judge that. I was in good faith too. Thank goodness I was never invited to do it on talk shows. So I didn’t have to publicly swear off like Platzeck, Schwesig or Krone-Schmalz, but called my friend Sybille. She has always called Putin a ruthless scumbag, and not because his eyes are colder than Justin Trudeau’s.
I was never sympathetic to Putin either. But there was respect. As a Bavarian, I would have said: “A Hund is a scho.” Like many of his compatriots, I gave him credit for leading Russia out of the chaos of the 1990s and the vodka flag of Boris Yeltsin. When he returned home at the beginning of that decade, the former KGB officer had had to hire himself out as a taxi driver. He found this so humiliating that he still doesn’t want to talk about it today. A little man and his pride.
A media report from 1993 was recently unearthed about a meeting with emissaries from German companies: Putin, now deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, advocated stabilizing Russia through a military dictatorship, model Pinochet. His guests, it says, gave friendly applause. That says something about the anarchy of the time, about economic priorities and Putin’s unambiguous relationship to violence. No, he hasn’t changed that much. Nevertheless, I just caught a whiff of Putin’s understanding – for his bilious grin when George W. Bush condemned Russia’s “unprovoked and unjustified invasion”. George W Bush! There’s no Russian film like that.
But it’s true: the former and, as it were, eternal Soviet citizen Vladimir Putin is waging an imperialist, revisionist and chauvinist war of conquest. Like Platzeck, I went to school in the GDR and I have to let that fact sink in. It costs others their lives, it draws certainty from my bones. In the dark hours, this is enough to raise doubts as to whether the semi-finalists Union can contest the DFB Cup final on May 21. The concern may seem trivial, and yes, I wish it was only for sporting reasons.