Comment: Putin’s Scholz – war with Ukraine is still postponed | Comments from DW Reviewers and Guest Writers | DW

Before the chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, had even made it back to the plane to fly back to Berlin, a message arrived from Kiev: the Ukrainian defense ministry and two of the country’s leading banks had been hacked. Suspicion fell on Russia. Moscow has a diverse cyber arsenal. And not always subtle. The owner of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, is also many-sided, and he is not delicate on principle.

Invasion of Ukraine postponed

There is good news: Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine has been removed from the agenda for the time being. Far too clearly, Putin has demonstrated his will to dialogue. This is Olaf Scholz’s victory on points. But if progress is a snail’s pace, then the peace deal with Russia is the labyrinth in which it lives.

Michaela Kuefner

From his trip to Kiev the day before, Scholz brought a small diplomatic souvenir – President Volodymyr Zelensky’s commitment to take the first step forward and submit three bills, which, in accordance with the Minsk agreements, he should have done a long time ago.

But Putin showed no interest in this. Although he himself often uses arguments as a legalist, this shift in position, for which the Ukrainian president took a fair amount of risk at home, Putin simply brushed aside. He doesn’t care about trifles. He thinks in terms of history, which the West often refers to as past times, and Putin as an actual challenge.

What, they say, to talk about, when “for 30 years now” they have been assuring that NATO is not expanding, but the opposite is happening? In fact, no one gave such guarantees. But this is Putin’s impression. It is his “alternative” facts that make the current conflict so dangerous.

“Cursed Duty”

Olaf Scholz acknowledged that positions differ on many issues. But it is our “cursed duty” to advocate for the preservation of peace, Chancellor called on Putin and, in a certain sense, himself. Russia, of course, also does not want war, Putin answered the question about war and peace. But he worries that any negotiation process can be dragged out, which Russia will not allow. It sounds like they are negotiating while playing with a loaded gun on the table.

Scholz and his partners in NATO and the European Union want at all costs to prevent the division of Europe into spheres of influence, as was the case during the Cold War. The benefit of this approach is Ukraine, which the local oligarchs themselves have long divided into spheres of influence. On Sunday, they and their clans flew out of Ukraine on 30 chartered planes.

So, what is next? Now the struggle for Ukraine will really begin, the search for a diplomatic way out of this squaring of the circle. This is nothing less than a new European security architecture, in the creation of which both Russia and NATO must save face. A worthy goal, the achievement of which will require a lot from the German government under the leadership of Olaf Scholz.

Posted by DW columnist Michaela Küfner.

The comment expresses the personal opinion of the author. It may not coincide with the opinion of the Russian editors and Deutsche Welle in general.

See also:

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  Face to face

  Joe Biden became the fifth President of the United States, with whom the head of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin met. In total, the number of different high-level meetings between the leaders of the USSR and Russia and the presidents of the United States exceeded one hundred, and some of them went down in the history of world politics. The first face-to-face meeting between Biden and Putin in Geneva in June 2021 was not a breakthrough, but the very fact that it took place is important, observers say.

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  First visit to the USA

  The first Soviet leader to pay an official visit to the United States was Nikita Khrushchev. In September 1959, he met with US President Dwight Eisenhower. No agreement was reached on any of the issues discussed. The return visit did not take place due to the scandal with the downed in May 1960 near Sverdlovsk by an American U2 spy plane.

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  Agreed to the Wall

  Khrushchev’s talks with the new American President John F. Kennedy took place on June 4, 1961 at Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace. The main topic was the fate of Berlin and Germany as a whole. The parties firmly defended their positions and failed to agree on key agenda items. Two months later, the Berlin Wall divided the city into eastern and western parts.

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  Discovering Moscow

  Richard Nixon became the first US president to pay an official visit to the USSR. The negotiations held in May 1972 with Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, marked the beginning of a new stage in relations, which was called “detente”. The Agreement on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (SALT-1) and the Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Missile Defense Systems (ABM) were signed in Moscow.

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  Before the war in Afghanistan

  The entry of Soviet troops into Afghanistan in December 1979 caused a new deterioration in Soviet-American relations. Six months earlier, Brezhnev met in Vienna with the new US President Jimmy Carter. The negotiations resulted in the signing of the Treaty on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (SALT-2), which, among other things, limited the deployment of nuclear weapons in outer space.

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  The end of the evil empire

  Relations between Mikhail Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan did not work out at first. After the first meeting in Geneva in 1985, one dubbed the other a “dinosaur”, the second called a colleague a “hard-headed Bolshevik.” That did not prevent them from holding several meetings and signing a number of important documents in the field of disarmament. Arriving in Moscow in 1988, Reagan declared that he no longer considered the USSR an “evil empire.”

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  Seasick Summit

  A two-day meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and the new American leader, George W. Bush, took place in 1989 in Malta aboard the Soviet cruise ship Maxim Gorky, docked in the port of Valletta. Despite the strong storm, the summit opened a fundamentally new stage in relations between the two countries. In particular, for the first time in history, a joint press conference was held between the two leaders.

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  Point in the Cold War

  The meeting of the first Russian President Boris Yeltsin with George W. Bush in the United States in the winter of 1992 summed up the 46-year Cold War. A declaration was signed stating that Russia and the United States no longer consider each other as possible adversaries. A year later, in Moscow, politicians signed the Treaty on the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (START-2).

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  Friend Bill

  Friendly relations connected Boris Yeltsin and the next US President Bill Clinton. They met several times. In 1997, in Helsinki, during the last summit of the two leaders, Clinton persuaded Yeltsin not to impede NATO expansion, promising to admit Russia to the G7, promote WTO accession, and help restructure Russia’s debt in the Paris Club of creditors.

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  On Russia’s accession to NATO

  In 2000, Bill Clinton came to Moscow, where he met with the new Russian President Vladimir Putin. No important documents were signed. The main sensation was voiced by Putin many years later. In an interview with American director Oliver Stone, the Russian leader said that he suggested that Clinton consider the option of Russia joining NATO, and he was not against it.

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  He is the king

  In November 2001, Putin became the first foreign leader to visit not only the ranch of US President George W. Bush in Texas, but also to attend a closed CIA briefing for the head of the White House. At the same time, the cooling in relations between Russia and the United States began precisely under Bush Jr., who already in 2006 said: “Putin is no longer a democrat. He is the tsar. We have lost him.”

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  Reboot at the burger joint

  A brief period of thaw in Russian-American relations fell on the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev in the Russian Federation. In September 2009, he visited the United States, visited the headquarters of Twitter and started his own microblog, received the latest iPhone from the hands of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and had breakfast with US President Barack Obama at a burger joint. And on April 8, 2010 in Prague, Medvedev and Obama signed the START-3 Treaty.

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  It blew cold

  Soon after Vladimir Putin returned to the Kremlin, a new deterioration in Russian-American relations began: from 2012 to 2018, official visits by the presidents of the two countries were not held. During the bilateral meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in Helsinki in 2018, not only no agreements were signed, but even no joint final statement.

  Author: Vitaly Kropman