“These are words of powerlessness,” says Eastern Europe historian Karl Schlögel, as we stand together for a moment shortly before the rally on Sunday afternoon on Bebelplatz in Berlin and talk about his public appearances over the past few days. But they are also words of anger, shame, and bewilderment, considering the historical roots of Putin’s war against Ukraine. Because so much was known, so much was known, so many excuses from the “Putin understanders” – a terrible euphemism we should never use again – never had any basis, and yet it was all accepted: Georgia 2008, Crimea 2014, the creeping annexation of the Donbass, the destruction of Aleppo. “We are dismayed,” says Karl Schlögel on stage in front of a few hundred people who came to the Ukraine solidarity rally in the freezing cold not far from the Russian embassy, which was closed off, “because we are spectators who we don’t want to be, who we are but were long enough.”
And then the historian lists how the Stalinist, the National Socialist and finally Putin’s acts of violence are similar. “Kharkiv, twice captured and destroyed by the Germans, is now being destroyed by Russian missiles. The country, once devastated by the starvation of millions in the 1930s, has recently become a country in which no more sowing is possible this year, so there will also be no harvest … And we could never have imagined that one day debris from the Kiev TV tower would fall on the Babin Yar site, where more than 33,000 Kiev Jews were murdered in September 1941.” When Schlögel finished his speech, he had tears in his voice.