The first day of the Munich Security Conference has come to a close, with the war in Ukraine and managing Russian aggression taking center stage. “The main question of the Conference is how to bring an end to the war in Ukraine,” comments the Süddeutsche Zeitung. “The Russian dictator is the only one who decided the start of the war and he is also the one who will determine its end. An obvious fact, but which many forget, attributing to Putin a rationality that corresponds rather to his need for a quick end to the war. It is now necessary to put a definitive end to the massacres and to make substantial progress in the negotiations. However, hardly any steps have been taken on this alternative, as the West is short-sighted. He is not concerned enough with the adversary in this war, which is not the Russian people, but the tyrant in the Kremlin.”

The Munich newspaper estimates that Putin “sees himself in the context of a great power confrontation with the United States, which is why the end of the war in Ukraine should be negotiated with the US president and not with Volodymyr Zelensky. […] Of course, it is a commonplace that, at some point, every war ends politically. But peace must be desired. And the only way to have peace, is to eliminate the huge injustice that Russia has committed. Peace comes only with the willingness of the aggressor to lay down arms, a willingness which the Russian president does not seem to have. That is why there will be peace again, only when Putin loses control of the war.”

The “Manifesto for Peace” and the cessation of arms deliveries

Sara Wagenknecht, a politician of the German Left, and Alice Schwarzer, a well-known feminist, author and journalist, published last week the “Manifesto for Peace”, which in just a few days gathered over 500,000 signatures. The Manifesto calls for an end to the war in Ukraine, renouncing, among other things, the unilateral strategy of increasing arms deliveries and promoting diplomacy and compromise. However, as the tagesspiegel reports, “Wagenknecht and Schwarzer are accused of a lack of demarcation, after they supported the Manifesto and members of the far right, such as the head of the AfD in Parliament Tino Hroupala. This fact resulted in some political scientists withdrawing their signature, fearing that the protest event will be hijacked by extremists and populists”. The manifesto had been criticized for calling for negotiations between warring parties in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and required concessions from both sides.

For its part, the newspaper Die Zeit comments that “the supporters of the “Manifesto for Peace” have illusions about the nature of the Russian war. […] Some spread conspiracy theories that the Americans or the British are preventing the end of the war. This is nonsense. So far, the ceasefire has been actively blocked by only one party: the aggressor. […] It is right to constantly examine the scope for negotiation. But it is known how Putin negotiates, how he breaks the agreements he makes and how little he can be trusted.”

Xi Jinping’s cheap rhetoric

China has declared its “decisive victory” against the coronavirus, as a result of the decrease in cases and the lowest death rate. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung disagrees in the most caustic way: “For China’s leader Xi Jinping to order an evaluation of the results of the government’s policy against the pandemic is brazen. Because even if it were true that the number of infections in China is falling rapidly, even he cannot believe that he has done everything right in the three years since the outbreak of the pandemic. But the system he has built around himself over the past ten-plus years forces the leader to use the cheap rhetoric that all people at home and abroad are now expected to believe as the new eternal wisdom.

It is naïve to think that a politician like the Chinese leader can calmly admit his mistakes, because all over the world, all those in charge must admit in retrospect that they were not always right. In China, the events to come contrary to the government line they are silent – with success. But millions of people there know what it was like during the pandemic. And they see how much their experiences, their suffering, is systematically covered up with propaganda. When the aura of infallibility is swept away, the descent begins for dictators. At least Xi Jinping is very close to that point.”