“For me, the Second World War came to an end with your marriage in 1999,” my Kiev mother-in-law once said. She has been living in the air-raid shelter since last week. In 1941 she fled to Russia with her mother from the Wehrmacht. This time she stays in Kyiv, where rockets are now falling.
Putin pushed the whole world into the abyss in a steady process, millimeter by millimeter, for more than 22 years, before the eyes of the world public. We are all experiencing a tragic historical turning point. Everything indicates that Ukraine is only at the beginning of mass displacement, destruction, suffering and death. And politically we are already in a heap of rubble. Matthias Platzeck, one of the most loyal defenders of unconditional dialogue with Putin, has resigned from chairing the German-Russian Forum because of his misjudgment of Putin. Most of the Russia experts in the Petersburg dialogue were wrong, especially the “Russia understanders”, but also the “Kremlin critics” like myself. Because the cause of the current escalation is not a lack of dialogue between Russia and the West, but Putin’s cold-blooded plan for a violent recolonization of the former Soviet space. How could it come to this?