Can Ukraine count on continued German support next year?

If you look at opinion polls, the support for Ukraine in Germany is quite low compared to other European countries. The latest polls say we are number 19 in the European Union. Support in Germany is something like 55 percent saying we should support Ukraine more. The European average is 61 percent. So the support in Germany is lower than in other large European countries, like France, Italy, Spain, Poland and, of course, much lower than in your country, for example, which used to be a republic of the Soviet Union and knows what Soviet aggression means.

Support is there, but it's wobbly. Especially from the point of view of the chancellor and his party, the war in Ukraine is a problem that should be gotten rid of. Part of it is old-fashioned, 70s pacifistic ideas. Others in that party have understood that we need strong and decisive opposition and resistance against Russian aggression. So this topic divides the party of the chancellor. He needs to get rid of it.

And I suspect that he might be ready for a wobbly peace that might not be worth being called a peace, just to get rid of the problem before the general elections in one year. So were I Ukrainian, I would ask myself, how can I nudge public opinion in the West, and especially in Germany, toward greater support, because it's not solid. And especially under this government, it's not solid.

What did Olaf Scholtz mean when he said last week that it is time to start looking for ways to achieve peace soon?

Well, on the one side, he says something similar to what President Zelenskyy also says. Zelenskyy plans for a peace conference in the course of this autumn, where Russia should be invited. Supporters from all over the world should be invited. Zelenskyy has also outlined a program for that conference. So, yes, Scholz is in the mainstream with this, what he said. But on the other hand, he parrots, in a way, what the pacifist movement in his party, and especially in the Russian nostalgic part of East Germany [is saying], where some think that a peace is a simple thing. They think, let us just sit down amongst reasonable persons and find a compromise. That is what the pacifists tend to think. Peace is the most reasonable thing, so just talk reasonably to Putin and he will find a reasonable way to secure peace for the rest of this century. So this naive illusion is something that I don't think Scholz has, but many of his voters have. And he gives them what they want, even if it is an unrealistic illusion.

I'm sure you've thought about why Germans have this kind of naive, pacifist vision. How would you explain it?

Well, there is a bundle of reasons. There is the deeply rooted German pacifism of the post World War II generation who concluded from German aggression and German, Germanist crimes under Hitler that war should never happen again. So there is a sort of deeply rooted fundamental pacifism within the German society.

Then there is also a deeply rooted fear of Russia, because Germany was rightly defeated. I think it's good that Germany was defeated in World War II, but still it was an enormous trauma. And the most traumatic part for German families was the war against Russia and the imprisonment in Russia after the war, the husbands and fathers coming back, if they came back at all, deeply traumatized.
So there is a deeply rooted fear of Russia, and also a sense of guilt because of all the crimes Germans committed in the Soviet Union.

And here, Germans have not yet understood that the Soviet Union at that time was not just Russia, but also Ukraine and Belarus. And that most German war crimes were committed in Belarus and Ukraine and not in what today is the Russian Federation. So there are a number of reasons. And this feeling is particularly strong in East Germany, where I would suggest East Germans have experienced occupation differently than, for example, your nation, Estonians.

First of all, East Germany was not a nation occupied. It was a region of a nation that, in a way, after the crimes of World War II, was asking itself, do we actually have the right to exist anymore? That was a question that many Germans asked themselves. So the Russian occupation was not as strongly resented as a sort of loss of national liberty in East Germany as it was in Estonia, the other Baltic countries, Poland, for example, which had a strong feeling of nationhood, which Germany didn't have, and especially East Germany didn't have.

And of course, Germany is a country that had a real authentic communist movement before the Soviets moved in. Other countries like Poland did just have marginal communist movements. I don't know how it was in Estonia /.../ But Germany is the homeland of communism. It's a country of Marx and Engels, and it had a strong communist movement. So a part of Germans didn't consider Russians as occupying enemies. They felt a sort of brotherhood amongst leftists and communists. So there is until today a sort of Russia nostalgia in all of Germany and particularly in the eastern part of Germany that was under communist rule.

To me, "never again" could mean never again should there be aggression, which would necessitate defending Ukraine. After all, Russia is doing just what the fascists did in World War II.

Well, you are absolutely right. Germany is blind in this eye. They say, never again shall aggression start from Germany. Never again shall Germans use military aggression. And they don't understand that there's also a responsibility to protect as something that can be learned by Germans from the crimes of Nazi Germany, not just not to do it again, but also to protect those who are today victims of aggression and to stand up against aggressors. This is something that many Germans have not understood, and I criticize my own nation, and particularly also my government, for this.

There's another aspect. Germany after World War II was for a long time divided.
And the Western part was under the protection of the United States and to a lesser degree of France and Britain, and the Eastern part was occupied by Russia. So a sense of national responsibility could not grow because the responsibility was always with the others, with the Western protector and the Eastern occupant. Germans don't have a tradition of taking responsibility.
And I can hopefully say that maybe a sense of responsibility is starting to grow, but it is not there now.

The idea of who, if not us, is not widespread in Germany. Because who, if not the largest economy in Europe, should take the lead against Russia? Who, if not Germany? Who, if not the country with the largest population, who if not Germany. This sort of thinking has not yet developed in Germany. We still consider ourselves as somebody who has found a niche under the protection of the United States, who have a small defense budget.

This year we have finally come to the 2 percent [of GDP in defense spending goal] that had been promised in 2014. Estonia is I think beyond 3 percent. /.../ So Germany is basically still a teenager that needs to grow up and understand that this life in a comfort zone protected by Daddy and Mommy United States will come to an end. The teenager will have to grow up and that's what has not yet been completed. I hope that it might be completed and that we do a crash course in responsibility in the face of the challenge of the Russian aggression, but it will take more time.

Will Ukraine receive more weapons from Germany next year?

We will have to see. The present government has decided to cut the funding by half this year compared to the budget planning for the coming year, saying that the missing money will come from the proceeds of confiscated Russian state assets. It is not clear at all when and under what conditions these proceeds from Russian state assets will come. The next budget is also not yet approved by the Bundestag. It remains to be seen whether the package of the next budget is going to be opened again, and whether this cut by half will end up revised, because there is resistance against this government plan to cut the funding by half, also within the ranks of the ruling coalition.

If you ask me, I think a little bit more than planned now is going to be given to Ukraine, but Germany is, the German government is going to drag its feet.
Also – and I cannot prove this, it is just a feeling and a suspicion that I have – it's part of pressure on Ukraine to agree to that peace, whether it's going to be a lasting peace or just something that looks like a peace but isn't.

From the German government's point of view, Ukraine needs to be pushed or pressed into accepting something that makes this problem go away for the chancellor, this problem that splits his party, makes it unfit to go into the next general election campaign because it's split on a central problem.
So I wouldn't expect very much from Germany. But it will also depend on the outcome of the elections in the United States, because Germany has always done what Joe Biden did. And if the United States, under whatever president, keep up the funding, Germany will do the same. If the United States fails to take the lead, Germany will probably not step in either.

There has been quite a lot of talk of Russian acts of sabotage in Germany and Europe. Are the Germans worried at all? There is a whiff of the Cold War in the air.

Yeah, Germans, in my perspective, are not aware of what is happening. Just look at the case of the recent exchange of prisoners where Germany gave Putin a convicted assassin, a convicted murderer who committed, who was found guilty by a German court of murdering a Russian oppositionist in Germany. This prisoner exchange, where the German government submitted to blackmail, was not deeply discussed within the German public. No alarms went off that we are basically playing Putin's game, where he sends killers to our country and then gets them back and then says – brilliant, I'm going to do that again. The game works well.

If Germany would be aware of the fact that we are in a hybrid pre-war phase, this very difficult decision to exchange prisoners would have led to much deeper discussions, but it hasn't. It was simply accepted at face value. After the convicted criminal Krasikov was returned to Russia, nobody disputed it.

Is there anything Germany can do against such occurrences? They may very well happen again.

What Germany could do would be to have an overall more decisive stance on the Russian aggression, to signal with every step that the government takes – listen, what you're doing is going to be very, very costly for you. Instead, what Germany has been doing since the beginning, or the early phase of the full-scale aggression, is always signaling, oh, we are afraid. We are afraid that Russia might use the nuclear bomb. We are afraid of escalation. Why doesn't anybody ask, why should not they be afraid instead?

That's how the Ukrainians are operating. They say, if they attack us in Donbas, why should we not attack them in the Kursk Oblast? Why should not they be afraid of what we do? So this is not a stance that signals to Russia, listen, we are strong, and you are going to have a strong reaction. That won't happen.

The reactions of Germany are always, we are worried. We are worried about nuclear war, worried about escalation. Let's try to find a peace, some kind of compromise. And for somebody like Putin, that is encouragement. He gets encouraged by the overall stance of Germany. So I don't think that particular individual measures would help. An overall stance that is similar to what your country does, what Poland does [is needed]. So we should learn from Estonia and Poland and the Baltics, I think.

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