How Might the Violence in Ukraine Come to an End? - René Pfister, Ann-Dorit Boy, Matthias Gebauer (Der Spiegel)

 A Year After Putin's Invasion

How Might the Violence in Ukraine Come to an End?

Russia's invasion of Ukraine began one year ago. But how might the war end? Russia seems further from victory than ever, but a Ukrainian triumph is also far from a foregone conclusion. What are the possible scenarios for an end to the conflict?

By René Pfister, Ann-Dorit Boy, Matthias Gebauer

Der Spiegel, 10.02.2023, 18.54 Uhr

Starting a war is simple. Ending it, though, is quite a bit more difficult. At the beginning of almost every military conflagration is the illusion that one’s opponent will be relatively easy to defeat.

When German troops headed off to the front in August 1941, they scrawled "Vacation to Paris" on their train cars. Hitler’s "blitzkrieg" ended up lasting six years.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin marched into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, he clearly believed that he would be able to conquer Kyiv within just a few days and install a puppet government. It was an illusion that vanished in the smoke from anti-tank rockets shipped to Ukraine by its Western allies. The Russian army, as quickly became clear, isn’t powerful enough to subjugate a people that is prepared to fight for its own freedom. And as the list of Ukrainian military successes has grown longer, their war aims have also shifted. No longer is survival the only goal. Now, they want to win.

War is a monster that ultimately grows over the heads of those who unleashed it. With the invasion, Putin was hoping to fulfill his dream of resurrecting the Soviet Union, but now, he finds himself not only fighting against a powerful Ukrainian army, but also for his own political survival. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on the other hand, who campaigned in the spring of 2019 on his professed hopes of being able to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict with his neighbor, is now determined to liberate all of Ukraine, including the Crimean Peninsula – with military force if necessary.

The upshot is that Ukraine, a country for which nobody in Europe felt a particular responsibility over the past several years, has now become a key crucible of global politics. The outcome of the war will have a significant influence on future developments. "If we turn a blind eye to the war in Ukraine, it will set an example for others," says a senior official in the U.S. State Department.

If Putin is able to swallow up Ukraine, why would he shy away from doing the same to other republics that were once part of the Soviet Union – such as Moldova or the Baltic states? In Washington, meanwhile, the war in Ukraine is seen as one element in a larger conflict. If Putin were victorious in Ukraine, might not Beijing see that as an invitation to conquer Taiwan?

One year after Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, the question is now the following: How can this war, the effects of which reach far beyond Russia and Ukraine, be ended? It is a war that has deep consequences for European security and for future relations between the nuclear powers of Russia, the U.S. and China. And the end isn’t yet in sight, it could still continue for quite some time, years even. Nobody knows how it might end. But what are the possible scenarios?

Scenario 1: Ukraine Wins the War

What would even count as a victory for Ukraine? Could a victory involve some losses of territory but survival as an independent country armed by the West to the point that Russia would no longer attack it?

For the Ukrainian president and the vast majority of Ukrainians, there is only one acceptable outcome to the conflict: the complete withdrawal of Russian troops from every square centimeter of Ukrainian territory. Whether or not it is realistic, the aim is clear.

Whereas President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was prepared last spring to negotiate with Putin over the Donbass and the Crimea, he now excludes the possibility of talks with the Russian leader. At the same time, 85 percent of Ukrainians reject making any territorial concessions to a regime that has committed massacres against the civilian population. "

Russia still occupies around one-fifth of the area of Ukraine. The more territory Ukraine can retake, the better are their chances for victory and, over the longer term, their political and economic outlook.

But can Ukraine really defeat Russia militarily?

More than a few Western military experts are cautiously optimistic about the possibility of a Ukrainian victory, not least because Moscow has repeatedly stumbled on the battlefield. The Ukrainian military, by contrast, has managed to win back half of the territory that Russia occupied immediately following the February 24 invasion. The Ukrainian army was able to prevent Putin from taking Kyiv, retook Kherson in southern Ukraine and pushed the Russians back across the Dnieper River, which divides the country from the north to the south.

The two armies now find themselves locked in a static battle across the entire front, one that is reminiscent of World War I. Most of the more than 2,000 Ukrainian villages and cities that are still under Moscow’s control will likely be far more difficult to liberate than those that have thus far been reconquered. Putin’s troops have been digging in for several months, the Kremlin has ratcheted up its war-time economy and Putin mobilized more than 300,000 soldiers last fall, of which only half have actually been sent into battle thus far.

"The Russian proposition is, to me, straightforward,” says American military expert Michael Kofman. It hinges on grinding down the strong Ukrainian military with wave upon wave of Russian fighters even if they are poorly trained and equipped. For Ukraine to withstand the Russian onslaught, Kyiv badly needs more weapons and munitions. The Ukrainian general staff said in December that they needed 300 tanks in order to launch a counteroffensive. But they won’t be arriving any time soon. The German military, the Bundeswehr, is intending to ship 14 Leopard 2 battle tanks and 40 Marder infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine by the end of March – and the necessary training of Ukrainian soldiers is currently underway near Münster in the German state of Lower Saxony.

But the delivery of older Leopard tank models from Germany will take significantly longer. The German government only authorized their export earlier this week, and because they are from the Cold War era and must first be refurbished, the initial deliveries of 20 Leopard 1 tanks will likely only be possible late this year. The 31 Abrams battle tanks promised by the U.S., meanwhile, are only likely to arrive at the end of 2023 at the earliest – while the bulk of the Leopard 1 tanks from Germany will follow next year.

Given that timeline, the question becomes: Do Ukraine’s supporters really want Kyiv to win? U.S. President Joe Biden has consistently taken a two-pronged approach: Generosity combined with circumspection. He approved the delivery of war materiel worth $30 billion, but he has only gradually ratcheted up the weaponry being sent to Ukraine. Anti-tank missiles were followed by howitzers, which were followed by rocket launchers and now battle tanks. Biden has, for the time being, ruled out the sending of warplanes.

"We are trying to meet the (Ukrainian) needs on the battlefield,” says the U.S. State Department official. But Washington, the official continues, is not at war with Russia. The Biden administration is seeking to help Ukraine without escalating the conflict with the Kremlin. It is essentially the same strategy being pursued by Germany and France, both of which have shown even more hesitancy than the Americans and have supplied far less weaponry.

The perceived foot-dragging by some members of the Western coalition has triggered frustration in Central European countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic countries as well as in Ukraine. Increasingly, that same frustration has been building among Biden’s supporters in Washington. Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, suggested in a late January piece for Foreign Affairs that NATO use the first anniversary of the Russian invasion for a "Big Bang” and announce an extensive package of support, including long-range missiles, armed drones, tanks and warplanes. He also argued that all members of the Russian state apparatus be added to the sanctions list. If we continue with piecemeal military and economic support for Ukraine, we will ensure that the war never ends, McFaul argued. Ben Hodges, the former commanding general of the U.S. forces in Europe, recently made similar comments. In a piece for the Economist, he presented a plan for how Ukraine could reconquer Crimea.

In conclusion, there is a possibility that Ukraine can win this war militarily. But it is a goal that the U.S. and many of Kyiv’s Western European supporters have not made their own. And if Ukraine is to emerge victorious, it will need far more support.

Scenario 2: Russia Wins the War

Nobody knows exactly how Vladimir Putin might define victory in Ukraine. He has never officially stated that his aim is to conquer the entire country including the capital, even if his troops sought to take Kyiv in the early days of the war. Russia’s initial justification for its invasion was that of protecting the population in the Donbass from Ukrainian "neo-Nazis.” Putin has also repeatedly called into question Ukraine’s existence as an independent country. It seems that his war aims are less that of taking over certain regions of the country than of exerting complete political control over all of Ukraine and turning it into a satellite state similar to Belarus.

A victory for Putin in Ukraine would always be a fragile one. Even if Kyiv were to officially submit to a forced peace, partisans and saboteurs would certainly make life difficult for the Russian occupiers. It is hard to imagine a majority of Ukrainians transforming into willing subjects of Vladimir Putin.

The Russian autocrat, though, could also present smaller successes as a victory. If he and his troops were able to regain complete control over the four regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia and obtain some form of international recognition, it could be enough for him to save face domestically. But even that would be extremely difficult.

The small and vocal group of nationalist warmongers has been massively strengthened in the last 12 months by the war in Ukraine. These ultra-nationalist circles would hardly be satisfied with a mini-victory, and they present the greatest domestic danger to Putin.

And the president doesn’t have too many options left for transforming the war into a personal success. The West may be concerned about the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons, but actually doing so would place Putin at the mercy of numerous virtually incalculable risks – and it wouldn’t necessarily help him on the battlefield either. Ukrainian troops are far too widely deployed for a single detonation to decisively weaken them. The use of a tactical nuclear weapon could trigger a nuclear escalation – or it could result in panic in the West and increase pressure on Western leaders to cease arms shipments.

If deliveries of artillery munitions and anti-tank missiles were to cease as a consequence of evaporating support for Ukraine in the West, it would only be a matter of weeks until Kyiv fell or Zelenskyy would be forced to make far-reaching concessions. For now, though, there are no indications that Biden or Ukraine’s other supporters are beginning to back away.

But Putin can play for time. The Russian leader is betting on the West running out of steam, says William Wechsler, who was a top official in the Pentagon under Barack Obama and now works for the Atlantic Council, a think tank in Washington, D.C. Putin, he says, has the advantage that he can extend the war and wear down his adversaries. "That is a very Russian way of war,” Wechsler says. "That’s how they beat Napoleon, that’s how they beat Hitler, by outlasting their opponents.”

Putin’s military may not be particularly motivated, but he rules over a population of 143 million people, including 25 million men of military age. Ukraine’s population, by contrast, is just short of 40 million. According to a survey conducted by the independent polling agency Levada Center in Moscow, almost three-quarters of Russians support the "special operation” in Ukraine, as Putin insists it be called. Almost all serious opposition politicians are either dead, in exile or, as is the case with Alexei Navalny, locked away in a penal colony.

In the West, meanwhile, public opinion is far from steadfast. Whereas a clear majority of Germans supported weapons deliveries to Ukraine earlier in the war, only just over half are now in favor of sending tanks.

Bulgarian intellectual Ivan Krastev has said that many wars are not decided on the battlefield or at the negotiating table, but in the voting booth – when a new leader is elected in a key country who has no interest in continuing the war. In theory, such a thing could happen in Russia, even if elections there are neither free nor fair and are hardly the most obvious path to a regime change in the country. Far more likely is that a leadership change in the West could have a significant influence on the war – first and foremost in the U.S., where presidential elections will be held in 2024. If Biden were to lose to a nationalist Republican like Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis, American policy on Ukraine would change dramatically. And Europe, which is still militarily dependent on Washington, would almost certainly lack the strength and the willpower to continue supporting Kyiv on its own.

In the U.S., the Ukraine issue is already being pulled into the approaching campaign. Tucker Carlson, one of the most influential right-wing TV personalities in the U.S., has been consistently using his show on Fox News to aggressively go after Biden and those Republicans who are in favor of weapons deliveries to Ukraine. One doesn’t need too much fantasy to imagine Donald Trump frothing at the mouth in the late stages of the campaign as he blasts aid to Ukraine as a waste of U.S. taxpayer dollars. "Through weakness and incompetence, Joe Biden has brought us to the brink of World War III,” Trump said a few days ago. It is crazy, he continued, to now send battle tanks into the warzone. Trump’s affinity for Putin, it should be mentioned, has always been greater than his fondness for America’s NATO allies in Europe.

Scenario 3: A Bloody Stalemate (with or without negotiations)

But what will happen if, as currently seems likely, neither side emerges victorious anytime soon?

There is one scenario for Europe and Ukraine that would likely be almost as distasteful as a Russian victory: a partially frozen conflict, a deep wound in Europe’s side with new skirmishes daily. It is a plight that Ukraine has known since 2014 in the Donbas, but it would be far larger in this instance.

"The Russians still think they can control of all of Ukraine. And the Ukrainians are not willing to give up territory that the Russians have taken since the beginning of the war on February 24, 2022,” says  Russia expert Angela Stent. "In that sense, we are further away from a peace agreement than ever before.” That, in turn, has led many in the West to demand that Ukraine, especially, must be forced into a diplomatic solution. According to one survey, around half of Germans believe that the government in Berlin should be doing more to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict, though it isn’t entirely clear what that might actually mean.

The end of the Korean War is seen by many as a model for a frozen conflict. In 1953, the armistice agreement created a 4-kilometer-wide demilitarized zone between the north and the south of the country, across which thousands of soldiers continue to face each other today. Lying between them are around a million landmines.

There are some in the U.S. administration who would like to see just such a solution for Ukraine – an outcome that would, they argue, involve "turning Ukraine into a porcupine.” The concept calls for Ukraine’s defenses to be upgraded to the point that Russia would no longer even dream of calling the country’s national borders into question – borders which will have been drawn as the negotiating table or which run along a cease-fire line.

For the time being, the political line adhered to by politicians in both Berlin and Washington continues to be that it is completely up to Ukraine to decide when the time for diplomacy has come. "We have to put the Ukrainians in the best possible position at the negotiating table,” says the senior State Department official. But a halfway serious offer from Putin would almost certainly unleash a debate in many countries that currently support Kyiv. "The challenge yet to come is: What happens if, at a later point, the Russian leadership chooses to offer some kind of cease-fire?” asks military expert Kofman. "That is when we will find out who is who.”

Putin could, for example, put forth a plan aimed at international recognition for the "people’s republics” of Luhansk and Donetsk, and which delays any decision on the status of Crimea. There is nothing currently indicating that Kyiv would show interest in such an offer. But what if the war is still raging in fall 2024? And if the fate of a second Biden term in the White House hinges on his ability to obtain a cease-fire?

After all, one element of the logic of war is that the price of peace continues to go up the longer the conflict continues.

If a cease-fire agreement is reached, the result would likely be far from stable. And Ukraine would certainly demand far-reaching security guarantees from the West for any territory it might renounce. And even that would be difficult for Zelenskyy to sell as a victory. Under such a scenario, it would be virtually impossible for Ukraine to be accepted into NATO or the European Union.

The Minsk agreements of 2015 – mediated by the West – proved unable to calm the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, with the deal never being fully accepted. And nobody in Ukraine is interested in another Minsk agreement, says Ukrainian political scientist Fesenko, as it carries the risk of a never-ending war. Yet exactly that scenario could be the most attractive from Putin’s perspective.

The Question Remains: How Should the West Approach Putin?

A negotiated solution would be fragile at best. And it also wouldn’t address the core issue: Once the war is over, how should an aggressive Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin be dealt with?

Though erstwhile imperial powers in Europe like France and Britain seem to have come to terms with the loss of their former influence, imperial reflexes in many parts of Russian society appear to be alive and well, and not just because of Putin.

As such, Europe has to get used to the idea of having a hostile power on its eastern flank for the extended future. In Putin’s narrative, Russia is fighting a courageous defensive battle against Western imperialism. During the celebrations to mark the 80th anniversary of the siege of Stalingrad last week, the Russian president held forth on the "Nazi ideology” in modern guise that is threatening his country. As is so often the case, the climax of his speech was a barely disguised threat to deploy nuclear weapons.

In many ways, Putin is less predictable than the Soviet leaders who ruled the USSR in the second half of the 20th century. Men like Leonid Brezhnev waged proxy wars in Asia and Africa and armed the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. But in Europe, the Soviet Union was a status-quo power. Putin’s Russia, by contrast, is interested in redrawing the borders of the old continent.

Putin is 70 years old. Rumors have repeatedly made the rounds that he is suffering from cancer. But would Putinism disappear if the Russian leader were suddenly absent from the stage? Russian political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, who works as a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, doesn’t believe that is terribly likely. The war against Ukraine may be Putin’s private obsession and only tolerated by the Russian elite out of opportunism, she says. But, she adds, even without Putin, "there would quite probably be an autocratic, resource-based government in Russia.”

 

Vladimir Potemkin: Putin's Disaster and What Could Happen Next - By Christian Esch, Susanne Koelbl und Fritz Schaap ­(Der Spiegel)

 Esta matéria da Der Spiegel começa antecipando o 9 de Maio, o grande da vitória russa contra o nazifascismo. Mas a parada será um pouco melancólica, imagino...

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/putin-s-disaster-and-what-could-happen-next-a-e8c89bfa-b7a3-4e32-908a-7642a301eda6?sara_ecid=nl_upd_1jtzCCtmxpVo9GAZr2b4X8GquyeAc9&nlid=bfjpqhxz

Vladimir Potemkin

Putin's Disaster and What Could Happen Next

­Der Spiegel, May 6, 2022

By Christian Esch, Susanne Koelbl und Fritz Schaap

06.05.2022, 18.42 Uhr

The world has overestimated Putin's power. His army is much weaker than thought, his intelligence services have failed and sanctions are starting have an impact. Will all this weaken the Russian president or make him more dangerous?

May 9, 2022 – what a victory celebration it should have been! Just imagine: Vladimir Putin, Gatherer of the Russian Lands, greets the victorious returning troops on Red Square. Ukraine shattered as a country, its capital Kyiv taken in a surprise attack, its government exiled. Along with the battlefield triumph, Russia also celebrates its ruler, who boldly changed the course of history, triggering the biggest celebration since the 1945 parade held to celebrate the victory of Stalin's army over Nazism.

Given the events of the past few months, that was likely what Putin had been hoping for. But the reality has turned out rather differently. On May 9, Russia will again celebrate Victory Day with a military parade, as it does every year, but the army that will parade through Red Square this time will be a humiliated one. Two and a half months after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia's armed forces are no longer the feared power they once were.

Russia's military pride has turned out to be something of a sham, like the village backdrops that Prince Grigory Potemkin once allegedly set up for his czarina to fool her into thinking he was settling empty territories.

Putin's troops have experienced a military and moral fiasco in Ukraine. Poorly led, poorly supplied, poorly motivated and poorly equipped, they have failed against an enemy thought to be much weaker. They had to retreat from their positions near the capital city of Kyiv. And what had been planned as a blitzkrieg has turned into a tough slog, a war of attrition.

It is all just as surprising as it is devastating to the system Putin has built. The Kremlin leader has spent years preparing his country for a major confrontation with the West – in military, economic and political terms. His declared goals are maximum sovereignty and autonomy, for Russia to be an independent pole of power in the world. Now, it has turned out that the highly equipped army is unable to overrun its poorer neighbor. Russia's economy – dependent on imports. Most of its vast foreign reserves – blocked by Western sanctions. Its intelligence services – unable or unwilling to properly inform the ruler.

Is Putin's system of power itself a Potemkin village, without the world, including Vladimir Putin himself, having noticed? What does it mean when this system's weaknesses are suddenly exposed? And does that make it more dangerous?

A pet project of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu is located an hour's drive west of Moscow: the army amusement park called "Patriot." At the park, you can ride in toy tanks, shoot with real AK-47s, watch re-enacted World War II battles and buy army souvenirs. Since 2020, it has also featured a church co-designed by Shoigu in olive green – the "Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces." House-sized mosaics depict Russia's armed victories through the centuries – all the way up to the 2014 annexation of Crimea and Russia's intervention in Syria. A mosaic featuring Putin and Shoigu and the country's political elite had also initially been planned. In the lower church, a spacious baptismal font allows for the baptism of troops, and weapons looted from the Nazi Wehrmacht have been melted into the steps.

The church's inauguration is symbolic of the new prestige the army has acquired during Putin's rule – in part attributable to the ambition of Defense Minister Shoigu. He brought glamour to the military, a new level of self-confidence and societal status. He gave the army not only its church, but also dashing new uniforms, a youth organization (Yunarmiya) and political officers for the kind of ideological indoctrination conducted in Soviet times. He kept the troops busy with large-scale, snap exercises. Russia's air force operation in Syria could even be seen as a patriotic film in theaters.

With the invasion of Ukraine, though, that facade has collapsed and bizarre shortcomings have come to light. Just this week, a secretly recorded conversation emerged in which contract soldiers from the Caucasus detailed all that had gone wrong for them. The men returned home on their own in late March to South Ossetia, a de facto Russian-controlled area on Georgian territory. In a conversation with the region's president, they complained of armored personnel carriers that wouldn't start, tanks that refused to fire, officers who hide from their soldiers out of fear, artillery that missed targets by two kilometers and wounded soldiers who weren't provided with treatment. They also lamented a lack of information, maps and radios and of grenade launchers they said were bent. South Ossetia's president rebuked the men and asked if they thought Russia would lose the war. "Yes, we do," came the reply.

Moscow prefers to keep silent about the number of Russians who have actually been killed in Ukraine. The latest official figures are about a month and a half old. In April, the British government said it estimated 15,000 soldiers had been killed, whereas the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces cites nearly 25,000 fallen. One military analyst in Brussels estimates that the Russians have lost close to 1,000 tanks. At least seven Russian generals have been killed. The flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the guided missile cruiser Moskva sank, apparently after being fired upon by anti-ship missiles.

The first days of the invasion, in particular, when the Russian army advanced on the Ukrainian capital, baffled Western analysts. "The strategic mistakes are completely crazy," John Spencer, an expert on urban warfare at the Madison Policy Forum think tank, told DER SPIEGEL at the time. Many observers now agree that the strength of the Russian military has been overestimated.

One of the most visible weaknesses is logistics. Overstretched, poorly secured supply routes turned into easy targets for small, mobile Ukrainian units, especially in the early weeks of the war. Just a few days after the war began, a U.S. official said that 70 percent of Russian forces would soon run out of fuel and food, or had already.

Glaring failures have also emerged in equipment maintenance – a result of sloppiness or corruption: Expensive air defense systems are getting stuck because their tires are defective, some missile launchers still have tires with "Made in the USSR" labels on them. "Their logistics have been disastrous throughout," says military historian Phillips O'Brien. "They just assumed they would steamroll the Ukrainians and they wouldn't have to worry about supply." Since Russia began concentrating its attacks on the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, these massive logistics problems have been less frequent, in part due to the fact that supply routes are shorter and the advance has faltered.

Documentos da RFA sobre a imediata queda do muro e a implosão da União Soviética, 1991: contra a expansão da OTAN - Der Spiegel

 Der Spiegel, Hamburgo – 3.5.2022

Bonn-Moscow Ties

Newly Released Documents Shed Fresh Light on NATO's Eastward Expansion

In 1991, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl wanted to prevent the eastward expansion of NATO and Ukrainian independence, according to newly released files from the archive of the German Foreign Ministry. Was he trying to assuage Moscow?

Klaus Wiegrefe

 

Usually, only experts take much note when another volume of "Documents on the Foreign Policy of the Federal Republic of Germany" is released by the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History. They tend to be thick tomes full of documents from the Foreign Ministry – and it is rare that they promise much in the way of reading pleasure.

This time around, though, interest promises to be significant. The new volume with papers from 1991 includes memos, minutes and letters containing previously unknown details about NATO’s eastward expansion, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of Ukraine. And already, it seems that the documents may fuel the ongoing debate surrounding Germany’s policies toward the Soviet Union and Russia over the years and up to the present day.

In 1991, the Soviet Union was still in existence, though many of the nationalities that formed the union had begun standing up to Moscow. Kohl, though, felt that a dissolution of the Soviet Union would be a "catastrophe" and anyone pushing for such a result was an "ass." In consequence, he repeatedly sought to drum up momentum in the West against independence for Ukraine and the Baltic states.

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had been annexed by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1940, with West Germany later never recognizing the annexation. But now that Kohl found himself faced with the three Baltic republics pushing for independence and seeking to leave the Soviet Union, Kohl felt they were on the "wrong path," as he told French President François Mitterrand during a meeting in Paris in early 1991. Kohl, of course, had rapidly moved ahead with Germany’s reunification. But he felt that Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania should be more patient about their freedom – and should wait around another 10 years, the chancellor seemed to think at the time. And even then, Kohl felt the three countries should be neutral ("Finnish status"), and not become members of NATO or the European Community (EC).

He felt Ukraine should also remain in the Soviet Union, at least initially, so as not endanger its continued existence. Once it became clear that the Soviet Union was facing dissolution, the Germans were in favor of Kyiv joining a confederation with Russia and other former Soviet republics. In November 1991, Kohl offered Russian President Boris Yeltsin to "exert influence on the Ukrainian leadership" to join such a union, according to a memo from a discussion held between Kohl and Yeltsin during a trip by the Russian president to the German capital of Bonn. German diplomats felt that Kyiv was demonstrating a "tendency toward authoritarian-nationalist excesses."

When over 90 percent of Ukrainian voters cast their ballots in favor of independence in a referendum held two weeks later, though, both Kohl and Genscher changed course. Germany was the first EC member state to recognized Ukraine’s independence.

Nevertheless, the passages could still cause some present-day eyebrow raising in Kyiv, particularly against the backdrop of the ongoing Russian invasion.

Germany’s policies toward Eastern and Central Europe also raise questions. The Warsaw Pact collapsed during the course of 1991, and Genscher sought to employ a number of tricks to prevent countries like Poland, Hungary and Romania from becoming members of NATO – out of consideration for the concerns of the Soviet Union.

The momentum of Eastern and Central European countries toward joining the NATO alliance was creating a volatile mixture in Moscow of "perceptions of being under threat, fear of isolation and frustration over the ingratitude of former fraternal countries," reported the German ambassador as early as February 1991.

Genscher was concerned about fueling this situation further. NATO membership for Eastern-Central Europeans is "not in our interest," he declared. The countries, he noted, certainly have the right to join the Western alliance, but the focus should be on ensuring "that they don’t exercise this right."

Was his position born merely of prudence and a desire to ensure peace for the good of Europe? Or was it a precursor to the accommodation with Moscow "at the expense of other countries in Eastern Europe" that Social Democratic (SPD) parliamentarian Michael Roth recently spoke of? The chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the German parliament, Roth is in favor of establishing a committee of inquiry to examine failures in Germany and within his own party when it comes to Ostpolitik. He believes that Germany "de facto denied the sovereignty" of its neighboring countries.

Roth is referring specifically to Berlin’s policies in recent years. But should the analysis perhaps take a look further into history? All the way back to the era of Kohl and Genscher?

“Initially, the former Warsaw Pact countries pursued the intention of becoming NATO members. They have been discouraged from doing so in confidential discussions.”

German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in 1991

Curiously, Germany’s Ostpolitik – both in the period leading up to German reunification and since then – has today become the focus of criticism from all sides. Russia, too, is among the critics, accusing the West of having broken its word with the eastward expansion of NATO.

Some of the documents that have now been declassified may even be reframed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his acolytes as weapons in the ongoing propaganda war. Because in several instances, Genscher and his top diplomats refer to a pledge made during negotiations over German reunification – the Two Plus Four negotiations – that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe.

Russian politicians have been claiming the existence of such a pledge for decades. Autocrat Putin has sought to use the argument to justify his invasion of Ukraine. Yet Moscow approved the eastern expansion of NATO in the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997, if only grumblingly.

 

Many of the documents that have now been made public seem to support the Russian standpoint:

* On March 1, 1999, Genscher told the U.S. that he was opposed to the eastward expansion of NATO with the justification that "during the Two Plus Four negotiations the Soviets were told that there was no intention of expanding NATO to the east."

* Six days later, the policy director of the German Foreign Ministry, Jürgen Chrobog referred in a meeting with diplomats from Britain, France and the U.S. to "the understanding expressed in the Two Plus Four process that the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the West cannot be used for our own advantage."

* On April 18, Genscher told his Greek counterpart that he had told the Soviets: "Germany wants to remain a member of NATO even after reunification. In exchange, it won’t be expanded to the east ..."

* On October 11, Genscher met with his counterparts from France and Spain, Roland Dumas and Francisco Fernández Ordóñez, respectively. Minutes from that meeting recorded Genscher’s statements regarding the future of Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) as follows:

"We cannot accept NATO membership for CEEC states (referral to Soviet reaction and pledge in 2 + 4 negotiations that NATO territory is not to be expanded eastward). Every step that contributes to stabilizing situation in CEEC and SU is important." SU is a reference to the Soviet Union.

As such, Genscher wanted to "redirect" the desires of CEEC to join NATO and was on the lookout for alternatives that would be "acceptable" to the Soviet Union. The result was the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, a body within which all former Warsaw Pact countries would have a say.

"Initially, the former Warsaw Pact countries pursued the intention of becoming NATO members," said Genscher. "They have been discouraged from doing so in confidential discussions."

For a time, the Germans were even in favor of NATO issuing an official declaration that it would not expand eastward. Only after the German foreign minister visited Washington in May 1991 and was told that an expansion "cannot be excluded in the future" did he quickly back off and say that he was not in favor of a "definitive declaration." De facto, however, it appears that he wanted to avoid expanding NATO to the east.

In Bonn, the initial capital of newly reunified Germany, the mood was one of self-confident optimism. The Cold War was over, Germany had been unified and Kohl and Genscher were pushing forward the consolidation of the EC into the European Union.

The chancellor also saw an historic opportunity when it came to relations with the Soviet Union. "Perhaps we will now be able to make right some of what went wrong this century," he said. After World War II with its millions of deaths and the partitioning of Germany that resulted, Kohl was hoping to open a new chapter in relations with Moscow.

The Soviet Union at the time was under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, an idealistic, pro-reform communist who the Germans loved since he had acquiesced to the end of East Germany. "If the Germans are prepared to help the Soviet Union, it is primarily out of gratitude for the role played by Gorbachev in Germany’s reunification," was Kohl’s description of the situation. The fact that Gorbachev was vehemently opposed to expanding NATO into Central and Eastern Europe was of no consequence when it came to the esteem in which he was held in Germany.

Later, the chancellor would say in public that he had been Gorbachev’s "best advocate." The two leaders used the informal term of address, passed along greetings to their wives and gossiped over the phone.

Kohl sought to drum up support around the world for "Misha" and his policies. He helped secure an invitation for the Kremlin leader to attend the G-7 summit and under Kohl’s leadership, Germany sent by far the most foreign aid to Moscow.

Kohl was deeply concerned that Gorbachev detractors in the Soviet military, secret services or state apparatus could seek to overthrow him. And an attempted putsch only just barely failed in August 1991. A group surrounding Vice President Gennady Yanayev detained Gorbachev, but mass demonstrations, the widespread refusal to obey orders in the military and resistance from Boris Yeltsin, who was president of the republic of Russia at the time, doomed the attempted overthrow to failure. Gorbachev remained in office.

It is hard to imagine what might have happened if the Soviet military had ended up under the command of a revanchist dictator at the time. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were still stationed in what had been East Germany and additional units were still waiting to be pulled out of Poland and Czechoslovakia. The German Foreign Ministry files make it clear that the withdrawal of the troops was a "central priority" of German policy.

And then there were the roughly 30,000 Soviet nuclear warheads, which represented a significant danger. The "nuclear security on the territory of Soviet Union has absolute priority for the rest of the world," the Foreign Ministry in Bonn stated.

From this perspective, any weakening of Gorbachev was out of the question, and the same held true for the Soviet Union as a whole, which Gorbachev was trying to hold together against all resistance.

Kohl and Genscher believed in a kind of domino theory, which held that if the Baltic states left the Soviet Union, Ukraine would then follow, after which the entire Soviet Union would collapse, and Gorbachev would fall as well. And that is roughly what happened throughout the year of 1991. Kohl, though, had his doubts as to whether such a dissolution would be peaceful. He felt that a kind of "civil war" was possible, of the kind that was soon to break out in Yugoslavia.

Gorbachav’s longtime foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, even warned the Germans. During a Genscher visit to Moscow in October 1991, Shevardnadze, who was no longer in office by that time, prophesied that if the Soviet Union were to fall apart, a "fascist leader" could one day rise to power in Russia who may demand the return of the Crimea.

Putin annexed the Crimea a little over two decades later.

In 1991, Kohl even felt it was possible that the poisonous form of nationalism that appeared in Eastern Europe following World War I could make a reappearance. He believed that if the Baltic countries were to become independent, "the clash with Poland will start (anew)." Poland and Lithuania fought against each other in 1920.

The conclusion drawn by the German chancellor was that "the dissolution of the Soviet Union cannot be in our interest ..."

Ultimately, the Baltic countries and Ukraine went on to gain independence. And it likely won’t ever be possible to determine conclusively if Kohl’s analysis of the situation was erroneous or whether the Latvians and Lithuanians were simply lucky that their path to independence was more or less peaceful.

Many Western allies, in any case, tended to side with the Germans in their analysis of the situation. French President Mitterrand, for his part, complained about the Baltics, saying "you can’t risk everything you have gained (with Moscow – eds.) just to help countries that haven’t existed on their own in 400 years." Even U.S. President George H. W. Bush, a cold realist, complained about the forcefulness of the Baltic politicians as they pushed for independence.

Germany’s friendship with the Kremlin even led Chancellor Kohl to overlook a criminal offense on one occasion. On Jan. 13, 1991, Soviet special forces in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius were unleashed on the national independence movement there, storming the city’s television tower and other buildings. Fourteen unarmed people were killed and hundreds more injured.

The protests from Bonn were tepid at best.

Just a few days after the violence, Kohl and Gorbachev spoke on the phone. The diplomat listening in on the call noted that the two exchanged "hearty greetings." Gorbachev complained that it was impossible to move forward "without certain severe measures," which sounded as though he was referring to Vilnius. Kohl’s response: "In politics, everyone must also be open to detours. The important thing is that you don’t lose sight of the goal." Gorbachev concluded by saying that he "very much valued" the chancellor’s position. The word Lithuania wasn’t uttered even a single time, according to the minutes.

Gorbachev’s role in the violent assault remains unclarified to the present day.

Eu não sou religioso, mas VACINEM AS CRIANÇAS, pelo amor de Deus... - Entrevista preocupante: Jana Schroeder (Der Spiegel)

A Low Risk Still Isn’t Zero Risk

A Chief Physician on the Perils of Germany’s Omicron Strategy

Infectious Disease Specialist Jana Schroeder believes this summer will mark a temporary return to near normality for many, but she warns there could be more COVID waves to come this autumn and winter. She also explains why German politicians have failed our children and what an “endemic” virus really means.

Interview Conducted By Rafaela von Bredow und Veronika Hackenbroch

Der Spiegel, Hamburgo – 2/02/2022

Dr. Jana Schroeder, 40, is the chief physician of the Institute for Hospital Hygiene and Microbiology at the Mathias Spital Foundation hospital group in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Her main focus is on the treatment of children during the pandemic, and she recently published a position paper on the protection of children with a group of scientists.

DER SPIEGEL: Dr. Schroeder, the Omicron wave is growing, local public health authorities seem to have capitulated in the face of it, testing laboratories are overwhelmed and the actual current case numbers can only be estimated. Have we lost control of the pandemic in Germany?

Schroeder: We are potentially far past a tipping point. We now have a positivity rate of over 30 percent on PCR tests, which means that almost one-third of all suspected cases are actual infections. A pandemic is under control when that figure is under 5 percent. Because of the lack of PCR tests, the actual data is getting hazy. Contact tracing has also collapsed. And the World Health Organization is expecting that half of the European population will get infected in the next eight weeks – presumably here in Germany, as well.

DER SPIEGEL: How have you experienced the chaotic pandemic management?

Schroeder: As a great loss of confidence in politicians. It’s an extremely unpleasant feeling. I always thought that they would always find an at least roughly correct solution, despite the differing positions between the political parties. But I hadn’t expected a decoupling of science and political action as drastic as the one that has influenced the course of the pandemic.

DER SPIEGEL: Schools were closed for months, and children struggled. You have now called for the protection against infection and the protection of the psychological health of children to be considered as one. How would that work? Leave schools open at any price?

Schroeder: No, not at any price! This absolute commitment to in-person teaching in its current form has many downsides. School is only stabilizing when it actually provides education, if it supports and strengthens children and youth, if there is a daily structure, a stable rhythm. At the moment, school doesn’t provide that, if only because of the constant infections and cases of quarantine. It creates stress for families, substitute teachers are needed and the pressure to perform never stops. A strong pandemic dynamic creates psychosocial stress, and the longer the psychosocial stress lasts, the more it makes people psychologically and physically sick. We have just summarized this in our interdisciplinary position paper.

DER SPIEGEL: How can children be better protected?

Schroeder: There has been a guideline on this issue for a long time that can be followed. You can move to online hybrid teaching, cut class sizes in half and create small groups. Well-planned online teaching is better than a school building that is open but where in-person teaching is constantly being cancelled. Especially given that there are plans for doing – ones that I am not the only person who has been puttering around with for more than a year now. Of course, nobody needs to listen to me, but I also don’t understand how the education ministers have been able to ignore the issue for so long. Instead of insisting on mandatory in-person teaching, there should be mandatory education.

DER SPIEGEL: In the United Kingdom, experts talk of "two epidemics,” a swelling one among children and a waning one among adults. How will things continue here?

Schroeder: Here in North Rhine-Westphalia, the number of cases among school pupils has doubled in the past week. We now have 42,000 infected children; 65,000 are in quarantine. According to the Robert Koch Institute (Germany’s center for disease control), only 17 percent of those under the age of 12 have received at least their first dose of vaccine across Germany. To this day, there is no general recommendation that children in this age group be vaccinated. Everyone in school will get infected. It appears that it’s no longer possible to stop that. What is taking place right now is mass transmission among children – a development that current German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach had categorically ruled out not so long ago. I think that could be clearly communicated. If we are rejecting a lockdown because of the social costs, then we should also honestly say that we will pay the price for it through the infection of society in its entirety.

DER SPIEGEL: And what does that price look like?

Schroeder: Children can get pediatric inflammatory multisystem syndrome (PIMS), which is a serious disease. Between one in 5,000 and one in 1,000 infected children get it. More than 50 percent of children who get it wind up in intensive care. Although this has been largely preventable in previous variants through vaccination, a low risk still doesn’t equal no risk. In Germany, we have approximately 9 million children under the age of 12 …

DER SPIEGEL: … which would mean, calculated roughly, at least 2,000 children with PIMS.

Schroeder: Just for comparison: When it turned out that one out of every 100,000 people vaccinated with AstraZeneca get cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, the use of the vaccine was stopped. And then there is, of course, long COVID, which is actually a hodgepodge of different illnesses resulting from an infection with SARS-CoV-2 that also affects a low one-digit percentage of children. And in the general population, we are talking about around 15 percent, of which approximately two-thirds are women, typically younger ones.

DER SPIEGEL: Does this also apply with Omicron?

Schroeder: We don’t know yet. The gaps in knowledge are part of the problem. And PIMS doesn’t show up until after approximately eight weeks, the same amount of time we have now known about Omicron.

DER SPIEGEL: How seriously do we need to take long COVID?

Schroeder: Now, there is very worrisome evidence in studies with a small number of long COVID cases among children, of striking changes in areas of the brain. There have also been findings of impaired thinking after an infection in some adults. It is better to prevent infections from the start, or at least mitigate them through vaccination.

DER SPIEGEL: There is also good news on this point: The danger of developing long COVID symptoms appears to dramatically decrease through vaccination.

Schroeder: But it’s still not at zero. And there is also data that doesn’t show this, but it’s pointing in the right direction, which pleases me.

DER SPIEGEL: Many people view Omicron as harmless. Is that a misunderstanding?

Schroeder: There is less severe illness with Omicron, fewer people die from it – and that is really great. At the same time, the number of deaths in Germany at the moment is still in the triple digits. And there is a misunderstanding, I think, about the term "mild symptoms” that always comes up in this context. According to the World Health Organization, cases are considered mild as long as patients don’t have respiratory difficulties. But a patient can be sick as a dog and feel like he or she is going to die, without having a life-threatening illness.

DER SPIEGEL: What do you say to people who are now attending "Omicron parties” to infect themselves?

Schroeder: Somewhere within the notion of an Omicron infection as a kind of natural vaccination, is the hope that the pandemic will soon be over. But hope is not a strategy. You have to know that it can backfire.

DER SPIEGEL: What do you expect to happen in the hospitals in the next six to eight weeks?

Schroeder: The sheer number of infections can outweigh the less severe disease caused by the variant. And even if the number of hospitalizations were to stagnate, we would still experience a shortage of personnel, because of the many employees getting sick. It would then be difficult to provide adequate care to patients in the hospital.

DER SPIEGEL: How many Omicron patients are you expecting in the hospitals?

Schroeder: We’re not making any forecasts. Things are still going quite well here. We currently have less than 50 COVID-positive patients in our hospital, almost all of them in the normal wards. We still haven’t seen a single case of serious disease with Omicron. But the Omicron wave hasn’t really reached the older unvaccinated people yet.

DER SPIEGEL: Are we experiencing the transition to the endemic phase that people have been hoping for?

Schroeder: It is true that Omicron is likely ushering in the beginning of the endemic phase. But it must be clear that "endemic” isn’t derived from the word "end.” Charles Rosenberg, professor emeritus for the history of science at the University of Pennsylvania, has said: "Epidemics ordinarily end with a whimper, not a bang.” I think that’s very accurate. It will be a good summer, I am certain of that – through the seasonal effect and because many people will have at least temporary immunity against SARS-CoV-2. For people who aren’t at any particular risk, life will return to something like our old normality. And now we also have several effective medications at our disposal that can often prevent serious disease. But the situation could once again become more tense in the coming autumn and winter. Immunity through an Omicron infection alone, without previous vaccination, is less broad than if you first got vaccinated against Delta and then get infected with Omicron. So, it’s plausible that Delta will once again circulate next winter. Besides, Omicron probably won’t be the last variant.

DER SPIEGEL: What are you expecting?

Schroeder: That’s a very difficult question. BA.2, for example, a cousin of the Omicron variant, is now dominant in several countries, including Denmark. But this doesn’t mean that the situation will change as a result. The virus currently has very many opportunities to multiply – in infected people and in the gigantic animal reservoir. Not just minks, but cats, dogs, mice and rats can get infected with SARS-CoV-2, even hippos! And the more a virus multiplies, the greater the opportunity it has to mutate. It’s like the lottery: A person who fills out just one ticket has a much smaller chance of winning the main prize than someone who fills out millions of them.

DER SPIEGEL: If the pandemic is now slowly coming to an end, is there still a need for the compulsory vaccination that many are calling for in Germany?

Schroeder: A high vaccination rate remains important no matter what. A low vaccination rate extends the pandemic – a high one would help us to finally be one step ahead of the virus. The question is how we can reach this high rate. I would have found it much better if we had done everything possible to make compulsory vaccination unnecessary, instead of always ruling out a vaccine requirement. Other countries like Portugal have succeeded in that. Instead, we have allowed two camps to emerge – vaccine supporters on the one and the vaccine opponents on the other – and now the situation is extremely difficult.

DER SPIEGEL: A common argument against compulsory vaccination is that with Omicron, the vaccination is purely self-protection because you can still get infected.

Schroeder: I believe that is totally wrong. If even just a part of the 3 million unvaccinated people over 60 that we still have in Germany gets infected, that, of course, affects us all: Then the hospitals will once again be less able to take care of heart attack and cancer patients. If you always emphasize toleration instead of consequences, then at some point you lose the sensible people. The people who have been cautious for two years slowly begin feeling that the person who acts responsibly is the dumb one. A minority contributes to prolonging the pandemic much more than necessary – with negative consequences for us all.

DER SPIEGEL: When the worst is over, are you worried that you will be accused of having been too alarmist?

Schroeder: I think that alarmism is more of a problem of the recipient than of the messenger. I myself am pretty rationally oriented, and I like to make well-informed decisions. I see the task of science in the pandemic as that of providing solid information. But I can’t influence in individual cases what people do with the information they get from me.

DER SPIEGEL: In talk shows, where you have often been a guest, it’s not just about scientific information, but also about emphasis and intonation. Did you carefully think in advance about what balance you wanted to strike?

Schroeder: Yes, very carefully. It is very difficult to find exactly the right tone there.

DER SPIEGEL: What are you most looking forward to when summer arrives?

Schroeder: To large, spontaneous parties! We actually always have our place totally full in the summer with family, friends, our children, their friends. I totally miss that. And it’s annoying to have to worry whether the people you meet with anyone are adhering to the coronavirus rules. At the point I stop caring about that, perhaps the pandemic will finally be over for me, too.

DER SPIEGEL: Dr. Schroeder, we thank you for this interview.