German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said on Wednesday that the West is tired of the war in Ukraine. “We have reached a moment of fatigue,” she told a meeting of the Baltic Sea Council in Kristiansand (Norway).
She cited the increase in the price of energy and food as a reason for such tiredness, reinforcing later that this is exactly what Vladimir Putin did with the conflict that started three months ago. “That’s why it’s important to support Ukraine,” she said.
The minister compromised in the end, but thickened an argument that has gained traction in Western discussions about the global impact of the conflict. At the Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, veteran American diplomat Henry Kissinger said that Kiev should cede the land occupied by Putin and declare itself neutral.
The German position may be even more incisive, if the report published by the diplomatic affairs editor of the British newspaper The Guardian is true, saying that in a conversation with journalists, Prime Minister Olaf Scholz said he did not believe in a Ukrainian victory and that his country would continue to support Kiev until for Putin to declare that he has achieved his goals.
Scholz is traveling in Africa, and there have been no comments from the German chancellery either confirming or denying the report.
The perception that Moscow is in a position of advantage comes from the fighting in the Severodonestk region and the growing alarmist calls in Kiev about the situation in the Donbass, a region of eastern Ukraine that has been the scene of civil war since 2014.
The city is vital for the complete takeover of the Lugansk region and thus positioning the Russians to advance on the remaining area of ​​Donetsk under Ukrainian control. The two provinces make up the Donbass.
If the Russian succeeds, he will not have overthrown the government of Volodymyr Zelensky as he has clumsily tried to do in the complex and insufficient forces of the initial attack of the war, but he will be able to reap an important victory: Ukraine is basically jettisoned from its pretension to join the war. NATO and the Donbass will be linked to the Crimea annexed in 2014 by the Putin-occupied area to the south, centered on Kherson.
Zelensky, of course, dismisses the hypothesis and says he wants to meet with Putin to discuss peace when the Russians call off the war and withdraw. This is not an option for the pressed president in the Kremlin, as it means almost an abdication at this point. What’s more, after more failures than victories, Moscow is advancing in its declared initiative to conquer Donbass.
Berlin can also thus point a golden bridge of exit in the world siege of the Russian, to use the image of the Chinese Sun Tzu in the classic “The Art of War” (4th century BC). It should not be read so unanimously, of course.
In addition to Ukraine, more assertive NATO members such as the US, UK and Putin-fearing Eastern European countries will point to the fact that Germany is ultimately unwilling to deal with escalating sanctions on Russian hydrocarbons —Berlin has always depended on gas and oil from Moscow, and has established great partnerships in the sector.
So far, with the US at the forefront, NATO has supported Ukraine’s war effort, but always within the limits it considers safe to avoid provoking World War III. Red lines drawn by Moscow were advanced again and again, but this did not satisfy Kiev.
Instead. The country’s Chancellor, Dmitro Kuleba, was received on Wednesday in Davos and harshly criticized NATO, as he and his boss had already done. “NATO, as an alliance, as an institution, is completely on the sidelines and literally walking. Sorry to say that,” he said.
He refers to the more reticent members of the alliance, such as Germany itself, but disregards in his speech that two new countries, Sweden and Finland, could end the crisis as new members of the club – a defeat for Moscow.
In any case, he returned to praise the European Union, which practically mirrors NATO in members. The bloc, in following the US and imposing tough sanctions on Putin, made “revolutionary decisions” that it did not expect to make.
Kuleba also called Russia’s offer to open a humanitarian maritime corridor in the Black Sea “blackmail” so that Ukraine can export its grain – an estimated 20 million tonnes of wheat, one of the world’s largest stockpiles, is dammed up. to embark in Odessa, threatening regions such as North Africa with famine.
The Kremlin, after all, made the suggestion in exchange for some of the sanctions it is subject to be lifted. The chancellor’s complaints add to those of Zelensky himself and his government, which says it is having trouble receiving weapons from the West, whose warehouses are attacked by the Russians. The president has already said that the situation in the east of the country is “hell”.
Meanwhile, Putin is consolidating the Russification of areas already under his control to the south. He extended the simplified process for obtaining a Russian passport to residents of Kherson and Zaporijia provinces, which form part of the Donbass-Crimea bridge. He did something similar in the self-proclaimed rebel republics of Donbass, which numbered 800,000 Russian citizens among 4 million people until the war.
