'Germany’s stubborn insistence on engaging with the Russian leader in the face of his sustained aggression (a catalog of misdeeds ranging from the invasion of Georgia to assassinations of enemies abroad and war crimes in Syria) was nothing short of a catastrophic blunder, one that will earn Merkel a place in the pantheon of political naiveté alongside Neville Chamberlain.''..the Germans have had about as much luck as the Russian army in Ukraine. That’s because Germany didn’t merely “misjudge Putin,” as Angela Merkel’s longtime foreign policy adviser, Christoph Heusgen, the new chairman of the Munich Security Conference, said last week.
Germany’s stubborn insistence on engaging with the Russian leader in the face of his sustained aggression (a catalog of misdeeds ranging from the invasion of Georgia to assassinations of enemies abroad and war crimes in Syria) was nothing short of a catastrophic blunder, one that will earn Merkel a place in the pantheon of political naiveté alongside Neville Chamberlain.
Slowly but surely, it’s begun to dawn on Germans that Merkel’s soft-shoe approach to Russia — which reached its zenith with the 2015 decision to green light the Nord Stream 2 pipeline despite Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its role in the separatist war in eastern Ukraine — didn’t just open the door for Putin to go further, it effectively encouraged him to do so.
..
Having been wrong about Russia and Putin every step of the way, Germany’s politicians have resorted to the “who knew?” card.
“I was wrong, we were all wrong,” Wolfgang Schäuble, the
éminence grise of German politics and longtime CDU finance minister, told the Welt am Sonntag over the weekend.
What Schäuble and his colleagues leave out, however, is that Germany’s allies had been warning it for years that it was underestimating Putin. When confronted with that reality, the Germans don’t know quite how to react.
After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reminded German MPs in a speech to the Bundestag this month that the business Germany did with Russia helped finance the war against his country and attacked them for paying “worthless” lip service to the Holocaust, they gave him a standing ovation — and then promptly returned to regular business, which included wishing two MPs a happy birthday.
During the Cold War, the term “useful idiot” became a label for moderates in the West who fell victim to the communists’ credulous arguments.
From Germany’s veto of NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia in 2008 to its pursuit of gas deals with Moscow to its resistance to send arms to Kyiv — the country’s leaders have served as Putin’s useful idiots.
All the while, the so-called Russlandversteher, the smug Russian sympathizers who populate the country’s political establishment, rejected criticism of their course, insisting they knew better while (
literally) laughing in Washington’s face.
No one’s laughing anymore.'
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Putin’s useful German idiots, March 28, 2022
Context'..Europe thinks it can separate business and politics, but to Putin it's all the same: business.''..stop construction of the Nord Stream 2 project..', September 20, 2020(Russia, Belarus) - 'Regimes that rule by fear, live in fear. They fear that one day the people will no longer tolerate their lies, thieving and brutality..'Kremlin Burning Bridges With Every Neighbor - By Vladimir Ryzhkov, August 4, 2009
(Complete withdrawal from Ukraine (Crimea and the Donbas)) - '..one way for Putin to show he was interested in peace .. "ceasefire, ceasefire, ceasefire"'(Russian Academy of Science) - '..Responsibility for unleashing a new war lies entirely on Russia.'(Mandela)(UN Responsibility to protect (R2P))(Russia commits crimes against humanity in Ukraine) - Shield against drones, aircraft, missiles, rockets and mortars (air exclusion zone)(Air exclusion zone) - 'Helping Ukrainians does not automatically =escalation or WWIII. We have every advantage.'Estimate: October, 2025 – Safire Plasma (beyond fusion) Reactors commercially available – Abundance