One can wish for peace, but above all it must be enforced with military deterrence. We were no longer willing to do that, which now robs the pro-Ukraine rallies of their credibility, says Gunnar Schupelius.
The demonstrations for peace in Ukraine are really impressive. On Sunday, many people took to the streets in Berlin again, on the previous Sunday there were more than 100,000.
The protesters are calling on the Russian government to end the attack and return to the negotiating table. The borders should remain open to refugees.
What is missing is the demand for a strong military that can protect us from Putin. Nor is there a call to strengthen the Bundeswehr, which only has 260 tanks left, while the Russian army can muster 13,000.
Instead, the current peace demonstrations are still based on the motto of the peace movement of the 1980s, which was called: “Create peace without weapons” or also: “Swords into ploughshares”.
Behind this was and is the conviction that rearmament always leads to war. That was already the wrong assumption at the time, because, as we all know, aggressive Hitler’s Germany could only be defeated by force of arms.
Today, however, this assumption is all the more wrong, because it was not too many weapons that caused the attack on the Ukraine, but rather too few. Contrary to popular belief, Putin was not encircled and cornered by the West, ultimately seeing war as the only way out.
On the contrary: he was a man of war from the start, and even more so when he came to the head of the state: the second and particularly brutal war in Chechnya established and consolidated his power since 2002.
When Putin attacked Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, he waited for the West’s reaction, which appeared indecisive and which he interpreted as weakness. He’s only impressed by rockets, not by pretty words.
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Europe never really understood that, and so it was probably the wrong decision when then Chancellor Merkel prevented Ukraine from joining NATO in 2008, which the USA wanted.
Merkel wanted to serve the pacifist mood in Germany with her veto. If Ukraine had been accepted into the alliance at the time, Putin would certainly not have dared the attack now.
But that’s old news. Anyone who calls for NATO to intervene in Ukraine today is 14 years too late.
Now we have to think about the future. You can only negotiate with a man like Putin from a position of strength. Anyone demonstrating for peace must remain honest and demand that NATO arm itself to the teeth. It is not pacifism that will prevent Putin from attacking the Baltic States, Romania or Poland, only our unconditional willingness and convincing ability to defend ourselves militarily.