Ukraine war at Hart but fair
Ex-General: “We Europeans are have-nots”
By Marko Schlichting
3/8/2022 1:54 am
The war in Ukraine continues. An end can only be reached through diplomacy. The guests on the program “hard but fair” on ARD agreed on Monday evening. But diplomacy is on hold.
The war in Ukraine continues unabated. There is no end in sight. But that is exactly what is urgently needed. A military solution is a long way off. How Russian President Vladimir Putin can still be stopped was one of the topics on the ARD program “Hard but fair” on Monday evening. According to the guests, a solution could be further diplomatic talks. However, Putin refuses to do so at the moment. But former Brigadier General Erich Vad also accuses NATO of a lack of willingness to talk in the show.
Putin failed to take Ukraine by surprise in the first 72 hours. “That gives the Ukrainians hope,” says Green Party politician and publicist Marina Weisband, who was born in Kyiv. Her family still lives there. She speaks to her relatives every day and describes their situation: “People try to stay calm and not panic.” They even take the war with humor, she says. She asked how the children of her relatives in Kyiv were doing. The answer: Her uncle Kolya, who is hard of hearing, just turned the TV up loud so they wouldn’t hear the shots. The people prepared for a siege, they hoarded food and water.
Weisband said it was no longer possible to flee Kyiv because it was physically too dangerous. You hear stories of women being thrown out of their cars, then the cars would have been confiscated. “Not necessarily from the army – there’s all sorts of things on the streets at the moment,” says the politician, describing the situation in the Ukrainian capital. And she sums it up: “People will continue to fight. The more Putin demonstrates the Stalinist measures he is implementing in his own country, the more Ukrainians realize that they have no future there after they have fought for democracy.”
Erich Vad, former security adviser to ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel, is certain: “If Putin gets caught up in a protracted war, he will end up the loser.” Kyiv has a symbolic meaning for the Ukrainians and that is why they are fighting in and for Kyiv.
According to Green Party leader Omid Nouripour, Putin is not concerned with Ukraine alone. If he is not stopped, he could also attack other countries. “It is important to support the Ukrainians because they are fighting for democracy and because they have a right under international law to defend themselves,” he says. However, there will be no military intervention by NATO at the moment. “A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is a slide into World War III.”
Political scientist Christian Hacke calls the Ukrainians’ “grim self-assertion” “heroic”. He thinks it impossible that people in Germany would react in a similar way in a siege. “We have a structural pacifism.” Hacke is certain that German diplomacy made the mistake of not doing enough to promote a neutral Ukraine – apparently forgetting that Ukraine was neutral in 2014 before it was attacked by Russia for the first time.
fear of nuclear war
According to Nouripour, he is not impressed by Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons. One must continue to support Ukraine and keep trying to hold talks with Russia. However, that is not possible at the moment: “Putin is not reliable, he is lying.”
Hacke is not afraid of a nuclear war either. He describes Putin as a pure power politician who, from his point of view, acts rationally. And he warns: “Putin is being demonized in the West.” His demand: negotiations on a free Ukraine without the negotiating partners losing face.
However, Vad does not see a European negotiation perspective. We shouldn’t pretend that we have any say in the matter, because the decisions would be made in Washington, Moscow and Beijing. “Putin reacts to military power. The Americans have it. We in Europe are have-nots. We have nothing to counter Putin but inconsequential rhetoric.”
Marina Weisband sees it differently, and perhaps her solution is the only possible one. Europe does have one power, namely economic power, she says at the end of the program. She hopes that “either for Putin or for someone from his old St. Petersburg clique things will get so uncomfortable economically that they will look for a way out of the war – and that they will finally pick up the phone in the Kremlin when someone calls.”