President Olaf Scholz announced this Monday that Germany will deliver weapons worth 650 million euros to Ukraine this month. In his first visit to kyiv in two and a half years, the German chancellor, who plans to meet with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, tries to clear up doubts about his country’s commitment to the attacked country.
Scholz’s visit comes one day after that of the new president of the European Council, António Costa, and Kaja Kallas, Josep Borrell’s successor at the head of EU diplomacy. And it coincides with a critical moment for Ukraine.
Donald Trump, who claims he will end the war in a matter of “one day,” returns to the White House in January. In February, Germany holds early elections in which the chancellor, who is trailing in the polls, wants to campaign with a message of “prudence” in the face of a possible war and nuclear escalation.
Germany is, after the United States, the country that has delivered the most aid since the Russian invasion of 2022, but Scholz has set “red lines” for this aid. The chancellor refuses to deliver Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine and refuses to use German weapons to attack Russian territory. He also opposes an immediate invitation to Ukraine to join NATO while the conflict with Russia remains open. But belonging to NATO is, for Zelensky, an “existential” question for Ukraine. He believes that these actions could cause an escalation that would turn Germany into a belligerent party.
The German “red lines” have created the impression that Germany, despite being decisive in preventing Russia’s victory since quantitatively its support is much greater than that of other partners such as France, is not fully reliable for Ukraine. The criticism has also been applied to the outgoing US president, Joe Biden.
Ukrainian analysts and media consider that the support from both countries has always arrived late and never in sufficient quantity to change the direction of the war.
Zelensky referred to this in an interview last Saturday on Sky News when he warned that his army had only received weapons supplements this fall to cover the needs of two and a half brigades, despite the fact that the agreement with the NATO powers was to cover the resources of ten brigades.
Scholz’s call to Putin
It was Scholz’s November 15 call to Vladimir Putin, after two years of silence, that most angered the Ukrainian side. Zelensky understands that the chancellor has taken a step to break the isolation of the Russian autocrat in the West.
Ukrainian political scientist Leonid Shvets wrote in November in the digital Telegraph that Scholz “personifies Western inconsistency with Ukraine”, but that it is not really his fault, but that he has even done more than his predecessors.
“Joking about Scholz is easy and exciting. His simple and unmanly figure seems ideal to illustrate German politics, which observes the situation timidly,” Shvets noted. But he specified that the responsibility does not lie with Scholz, but with his predecessor, Angela Merkel, and especially with the previous Social Democratic chancellors, from Willy Brandt to Gerhard Schröder, for having implemented the policy of appeasement with Russia.
“Ukraine can trust Germany,” Scholz defended himself in a statement before meeting with Zelensky. “We say what we do and we do what we say.”
Aside from Scholz, international pressure is increasing on Ukraine for a negotiation to stop the war. Trump has stated that his goal is to force kyiv and Moscow to negotiate. Zelensky has adapted to the situation by admitting that the war must end in 2025, but that only a “show of force” can serve to bring Putin to the table and sign peace.
The question is whether Putin wants to negotiate. Its troops advance in the Donetsk province and push back the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Russian province of Kursk, partially occupied since August. Bombing to destroy the Ukrainian energy network continues.
The Russian leader threatened kyiv’s Western allies with the use on November 21, for the first time in an armed conflict, of a hypersonic ballistic missile designed for nuclear war. Putin said there would be new launches of this rocket if Ukraine returned to using American and British conventional long-range missiles against targets on Russian soil.
Scholz is running, in the campaign for the February 23 elections, as the guarantee of a moderate position between, on the one hand, the left-wing populists and the extreme right sympathetic to Russia, and on the other, Christian democracy and the Greens. , who are still their government partners. Christian Democrats and environmentalists are in favor of increasing aid to Ukraine and sending the Taurus missiles, but the chancellor believes that this position runs the risk of provoking an escalation with a nuclear power such as Russia.
“With my new visit to kyiv,” Scholz said, “I want to express my solidarity with Ukraine, and make it clear that Germany will continue to be Ukraine’s strongest supporter in Europe.”
The chancellor has not visited the Ukrainian capital since June 2022, four months after the large-scale Russian invasion on February 24 of the same year. On that occasion he traveled in the company of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the then Italian prime minister, Mario Draghi.
