It's not the first time Germany has played for the wrong team in history. Therefore, it should not surprise anyone that on the question of how to relate to Russia, Berlin has been in the wrong camp for the past 16 years.. Less predictable has been the speed with which Germany has abandoned its stance towards Moscow in recent weeks by stalling the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project, sending weapons to Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia..

She even announced that she was going to inject significant amounts into her own army, writes Politico. In other words, almost overnight, Berlin agreed to do everything the US and other allies had been demanding of it for years.. He even came up with a slogan for these changes - Zeitenwende, that is, the dawn of a new era.. After a few weeks, it became clear that the German leaders were only trying to say one thing: "

From this point of view, the successes of the Germans can be compared with the achievements of the Russian army in Ukraine.. Because Germany didn’t just “get Putin wrong,” as Angela Merkel’s longtime foreign policy adviser and newly appointed head of the Munich Security Conference, Christoph Heusgen, said last week.. German stubbornness in cooperating with the Russian leader in spite of his constant aggression (the catalog of crimes ranges from the invasion of Georgia to the murder of political enemies abroad to war crimes in Syria) was a disastrous mistake, placed by Merkel in the pantheon of political naivety along with Neville Chamberlain.

Slowly but surely, the Germans began to notice that Merkel's soft approach to Russia, which culminated in the decision in 2015 to give the green light to Nord Stream 2 despite the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, was actually encouraging Putin to continue his course.. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is not just a cross on Merkel’s chancellorial legacy, but on a whole generation of German politicians from across the spectrum, blinded by nostalgia for the “Ostpolitik” and “change through trade” approaches of Chancellor Willy Brandt in the 1970s. Germans believe these political approaches ended the Cold War.

German collective responsibility is the reason why it's easier to say it's necessary to " There is no Churchill-like figure in German politics who has warned for years about the dangers of trusting Putin.. Merkel is, of course, most responsible for falling into the Russian leader's trap.. But the truth is that the entire political class in Germany is to blame.

As former finance minister and vice chancellor in Merkel's cabinet, current Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose Social Democrats were the main force behind Nord Stream 2, has now spearheaded the narrative that the best way to deal with Putin is to wage endless " His national security adviser Jens Plutner became the chief architect of such policies during his years as a powerful diplomat in the German Foreign Office under Foreign Minister Franco-Walter Steinmeier (another Social Democrat). Even as Putin pulled tens of thousands of troops to the Ukrainian border in December, Pletner advised Scholz to support Nord Stream 2 and publicly repeat the fiction that the pipeline was only a “commercial project.”. Former Plotner chief Steinmeier, who in 2016 accused NATO of "

Today, Steinmeier, who as president should serve as a moral authority for Germany, is organizing concerts " One of these concerts took place in early March in Dresden, while Russian bombs were falling on Kharkov.. Over the weekend, Ukraine's ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, announced he would boycott the latest Steinmeier-hosted event, saying Ukrainians don't have time for "

The liberal parties Free Democrats and the Greens are not as responsible for the policies that led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as Merkel's CDU/CSU and the Social Democrats. But they also did not deserve political fame..

The Greens were against Nord Stream 2. But this was dictated more by environmental views than by solidarity with Ukraine.. More important was the protest against the transfer of weapons to Kiev. This position changed only after the start of the war.. Free Democrats split over Nord Stream 2. At the same time, the majority in the party, including deputy party leader Wolfgang Kubicki, supported greater cooperation with Russia.. According to Melnyk, Free Democrats leader Christian Lindner, who also holds the position of finance minister, once told him: if the war starts, there will no longer be any point in sending weapons to Ukraine or disconnecting Russia from SWIFT.. Because Ukrainian sovereignty in this case will live in a matter of hours.

Skepticism about the prospects of Ukraine, not to mention the consequences of strong pressure on Russia, was also widespread in the main opposition party, the CDU.. In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion, party leader Friedrich Merz warned that Russia's cut off from SWIFT would be a "

Mistakes about Russia and Putin at every turn, German politicians are now playing the card under the slogan: “Who knew?

" We were all wrong,” said Wolfgang Schauble, CDU finance minister for many years..

But Schauble and his colleagues prefer not to recall all the reservations of the German allies that Putin should not be underestimated.. Germans do not know how to react when they are pointed to reality. After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reminded German deputies during a speech in the Bundestag that German business is helping Russia finance the war against his country, they applauded him. And then they went back to their daily activities.. In particular, they congratulated one of the deputies on his birthday.

During the Cold War, the term " From Germany's veto on Ukraine and Georgia's entry into NATO in 2008, to trying to negotiate gas deals with Moscow and refusing to send arms to Kiev, Germany's leaders have been useful to Putin's idiots..

Meanwhile, the so-called Russlandversteher - as the Russian sympathizers who flooded the country's political establishment were called - rejected criticism of their course, insisting that they know better, literally laughing in Washington's face.. Now nobody laughs. Although the Allies applaud Berlin's " Ukraine, which Germany plundered during the Second World War and lost more than 15% of its population at that time, will definitely not forget or forgive. Germany will not gain real trust in NATO, no matter how many billions it spends on its defense, until there is an honest retribution for Merkel's story with Putin.