Scholz doesn’t want Ukraine to win

by time news

The war is a dynamic situation, said Carlo Masala from the Munich University of the Armed Forces about halfway through the program “Anne Will”. You have to occasionally adjust your posture to them. However, Masala said that too little is being said about it in public.

By this time, on Sunday evening, the impression was already growing that the stereotypes about the Russian war against Ukraine that had been circulating for months had once again been exchanged. Hardly any change of position in the debate.

For some time now, the suspicion that Chancellor Scholz is an insecure cantor, who not only sees his hesitancy as a character blemish, but may also have no interest in Ukraine’s success, has been particularly popular. The Federal Chancellor a gambler, even a cardsharp? The CDU defense expert Roderich Kiesewetter formulated this assumption quite explicitly by suspecting that he was playing for time: “I’m afraid that the Federal Chancellor does not want Ukraine to win the war.”

Who has what war aims?

At that moment, Anne Will seemed to have sensed that the headline of the late evening was hidden behind this quote. “Now it’s out,” she said triumphantly, but her discussants didn’t seem to want to get into it and preferred to stick to their positions.

For Left MP Jan van Aken, this consisted of vehemently defending the idea that diplomatic means had not yet been exhausted. Kyiv-born publicist Marina Weisband tartly interjected that this was a position she also took in 2014. But now it can only be a matter of letting Ukraine emerge victorious from the war.

“Win”, “don’t lose”, “Ukraine must survive” – ​​what exactly is to be understood by all this fluctuated during the course of the evening. Sometimes there was talk of a military victory, then again of a place for Ukraine in the world in which the Ukrainians are not the ones being driven out, of resilience, i.e. general resistance, was also mentioned, but also of an impending war of attrition, which too requires acceptance in this country. Ukraine’s success, as Masala put it with dialectical subtlety, could still become a problem.

Michael Roth (SPD), the chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the Bundestag, who a few weeks ago had increased the pressure on the mood for the delivery of heavy weapons by traveling together with Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (FDP) and Anton Hofreiter to Lviv in western Ukraine , this time the task was to compare the fueled distrust in Chancellor Scholz with political reality.

He referred to five effective packages of sanctions, the surrender of arms, the delivery routes of which can sometimes be very difficult, and the unconditional desire to support Ukraine. But: “I don’t have to be ashamed that I changed my mind during the course of the war.”

NATO and Turkey were not discussed

However, Roth’s emotional confession that he had no recipe for the appropriate behavior in this war soon dissolved into general cacophony about war aims. At no time, however, did they seem to be able to agree on the early realization made by Carlo Masala that this was also interpreted very differently among the allies. The war, a dynamic situation – see above.

“Bigger NATO, more weapons?” was the title of the program, but it was not until 10:32 p.m. before the keyword came up, Turkey, which is just now defiantly vetoing the inclusion of Sweden and Finland in the western defense alliance. But Erdogan’s perfidious game was not picked up. The fickle Chancellor Olaf Scholz was the far more fruitful topic that evening. And the geostrategic poker of the aged Turkish autocrat? Maybe next time or with one of the other talk colleagues.

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