Rarely has more lip service been paid in Berlin than now in the direction of Ukraine. The solidarity addresses are not credible if we don’t even know how to counter Russian aggression, says Gunnar Schupelius.
On Wednesday, from 6:30 p.m. to midnight, the Brandenburg Gate was bathed in the national colors of Ukraine, blue and yellow. As a free city, Berlin stands “for a free and sovereign Ukraine,” said Governing Mayor Giffey (SPD). A few hours later, free and sovereign Ukraine was overrun by Russian tanks.
A debate on Thursday in the Berlin House of Representatives was just as helpless. “We stand together on the side of Ukraine,” said SPD parliamentary group leader Raed Saleh. The leader of the Greens parliamentary group, Silke Gebel, promised “that we will help everyone who is now fleeing”.
The House of Representatives planned a joint resolution on the Russian invasion. But no agreement could be reached. The ruling parties wanted to exclude arms supplies to Ukraine. The CDU and FDP did not want to do that in principle.
So the SPD, the Greens and the Left passed their own resolution. There, the “Russian aggression against Ukraine” is condemned and the federal government asked to “continue to rely on diplomacy and civil conflict resolution with the European Union”.
What does that mean in the face of a war of such brutality as is being ordered by Putin? What is the value of all these warm words? On Thursday, more lip service was paid than ever before, so many phrases could rarely be heard.
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It was as if the seriousness of the situation had not really been recognized. The Chamber of Deputies dealt only briefly with the war, then it was on to business as usual.
The Greens politician Antje Kapek explained in tears why she had to resign her job as parliamentary group leader, namely “for private reasons”. She was given three green balloons. Parliament President Dennis Buchner praised her decision and said: “There can be more important things than politics, namely your own work-life balance.”
In the case of Ukraine, Berlin politics retreated to the usual program: conflict resolution without weapons, taking in refugees. This self-righteous and morally arrogant attitude never seemed so unworldly as it did on Thursday.
With the Putin regime, conflicts can no longer be resolved without weapons. The only thing that helps now is an extremely heavily armed West, which can use its deterrence to ensure that the Russian army does not march any further and that Putin once again sticks to agreements.
Nothing was heard of any of this on Thursday. Not even the Bundeswehr was mentioned, which is supposed to defend Lithuania and is not capable of doing so and therefore needs to be upgraded.
The resolution of the Berlin House of Representatives is not worth much if we cannot help Ukraine at all at the moment. And it’s not very convincing to illuminate the Brandenburg Gate when we don’t know how to counter Russian aggression.
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