To Russia Without (Much) Love from Germany
Chancellor Olaz Scholz’ telephone call (on Scholz’ inititive) to Russian president Vladimir Putin yesterday (Friday, November 15) - the first such call in two years -followed a few days after US president elect Donald Trump’s call to Scholz (made November 10th) which followed four days after the collapse of Germany’s governing coalition on November 6 when Scholz (Social Democrat) fired his finance minister Christian Lindner (Free Democrat) following disagreement between Scolz and Linnder over how best to overcome a budget shortfall of some $13 billion.
The call has been widely considered an opening or invitation by Scholz to Putin to better relations between Russia and the West.
Invitations have been more romantic than this one.
This one came with peremptory demands, propandistic premises and accusatory tone. Scholz requested that Russia withdraw its troops and remain open to negotiations over Ukraine. He implied that he thought Russia had lost the war because it had not gained its principal objective which, he falsely claimed, was to seize the entirety of Ukraine. Putin has never ever said anything so remotely silly, unrealistic and unwanted by Russia. Scholz disapprovingly referenced Russia’s supposed deployment of North Korean troops - something for which I still think actual evidence is sorely lacking. Even were it true, Scholz’ complaint would still smell highly of hypocrisy given the far more egregious intervention for over two years into Ukraine of all manner of NATO troops and weapons including, especially, German. It would also seem to discard the relevancy of the fact that were North Korean troops to be used, the signs suggest they would be used only on Russian territory against invading Ukrainian forces in Kursk, something entirely legitimate in war.
Scholz is thought by some of his opposition to have been motivated by fear of a Trump deal on Ukraine with Putin, going over the heads of Germany and the EU.
Putin told Scholz that Russia is always open to talks but that a peace deal must acknowledge Russia’s territorial gains and security demands. These include a demand that Ukraine must remain neutral, permanently. I don’t believe that Putin spelt it out, but by “neutrality,” I believe that Russia means not simply neutrality with respect to NATO, but also to Ukrainian membership of the EU which increasingly appears to have converged into NATO or even wants to become a superordinate NATO all on its own. This might happen if the EU can manouver itself the powers to raise its own money and its own armies, a goal that many suspect drives the likes of Ursula von der Leyen. For the EU, one might argue, the proxy war over Ukraine has been a means to try to cement support for further centralization of the empire of liberal authoritarianism that the EU now stands for.
By deployment of the term “neutrality,” I also believe Russia rejects any “work-arounds” such as one-off bilateral security deals between individual European powers and Ukraine as have occurred in recent months.
Putin probably did not need to tell Scholz that Russia is not going to withdraw its troops, not now, not ever.
The Scholz call is first and foremost the product of panic in Germany’s ruling establishment following the collapse of the coalition between the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Free Democrats. The reasons for that collapse are rarely made crystal clear by Western mainstream media, who prefer to invoke budgetary difficulties and disagreements over energy and climate issues.
All these issues. however. converge on the one giant elephant in the room which is, of course, Germany’s participation in NATO’s proxy war with Russia over Ukraine, and growing anger among the German population over the extravagant abandon with which German elites have scattered German taxpayer wealth to Zelenskiy, his Banderite brothers and the weapons and men they have deployed on behalf of the West, against a Russian invasion of pro-Russian oblasts of Eastern Ukraine. This was an invasion that Ukraine and the West deliberately provoked along the lines proposed by the US military-industrial think tank the RAND, in its 2019 report on Extending Russia. All that wealth, it is now clear, has been for naught, and Russia is winning the war, and Scholz and his peers across Europe are about to be deeply humilitated before their own peoples for their vanity, greed, and stupidity.
Scholz faces a motion of no-confidence on December 16th which he almost certainly will lose. The date for new elections has already been agreed namely, February 23 2025.
Polls strongly suggest that the party that will perform best in the new elections - anticipated to achieve around 30% of the overall vote) - will be the Christian Democrats under the leadership of Friedrich Merz. That in itself promises no revolution, but the jacks in the pack are represented by two new parties gestated from popular discontent with a pampered and disconnected German elite (reminiscent of the Democrats in the US, and of the Eurocrats under EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen). The newcomers are the Alternative for Germany party (AfD) and the The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). One is commonly referred to as “right wing,” the other as “left.”
What they share is a suspicion about the role of immigration in Germany as a tool for elite control of the economic interests of the working class, a demand for the end to the stupidest war in European history against Russia, and a recalibration of German transition from fossil to alternative fuels. This latter transition, ironically, has led to an increase in German dependence on dirty coal and an increase in its carbon footprint, while Russia’s prevailing use of natural gas and nuclear power has lowered its carbon footprint. The two new parties did very well in recent State elections in Thuringia and Saxony (main constituents of the former East Germany). AfD won in Thuringia with 33% of the vote, and came second in Saxony with 31% of the vote, while the BSW achieved 12% of the vote in Saxony and 16% in Thuringia. In Thuringia, the ruling coalition received only 10%.
Germany’s problems are far more than just political, as the recent closure of many Volkswagon factories has demonstrated among other confirmations of Germany’s deindustrialization. This came about, in the first place, because, following Russia’s SMO in 2022 Europe, aflame with a sense of entitlement and the passion of “sanctions-ocracy,” declared that it would subject Russian pipeline-delivered oil and gas to caps and a phase-out, to which Russia responded with a demand for payment in rubles, a demand which Europe unreasonably rejected, then followed by a Russian discontinuance of supply. The US stepped in with a brutal, if partial, annihilation of one or both Nord Stream pipelines, in an endeavor to make it impossible for Europe ever to recover access to cheap Russian oil and gas or for it ever again to constitute a threat to US hegemony.
All this despite the fact that all the alternatives to Russian pipeline-delivered oil and gas were far more expensive. These alternatives, extraordinarily, included (1) re-exported Russian oil and gas through third party suppliers such as India, or (2) direct export via Russian shipping networks that found ways to operate outside the constrsints of the Western monopoly on shipping insurance, or (3) through Russian LNG exports into German ports in competition with increasing German dependence on US LNG, the supply of which is contingent on oil prices in the domestic US market, or (4) as agreed on both sides, a continuance of supply of Russian oil and gas by pipeline, through Ukraine (Ukraine continuing to collect transit fees!) to Austria, Hungary and Slovakia - an arrangement that Zelenskiy now threatens to close down in January 2025 in a fit of spite against Hungary’s Prime Minister Orban’s opposition to continuing EU support for Ukraine, and one which may end (in a double whammy) for Austria if Austria refuses payments to Russia’s Gazprom on account of a Stockholm-based arbitration finding last week, against Russia’s Gazprom (yes, it’s complicated…). Last December, Austria depended on Russian oil and gas for 98% of its requirements.
Zelenskiy’s petulant response to news of Scholz’ call to Putin was to denounce it on the ground that it would initiate a steady reduction in what he calls Russian “isolation,” now a manifestly preposterous claim - nonetheless revealing of the still cloistered Western fantasy of its own continuing primacy - in view of the highly visible leadership that Russia supplies to the BRICS, and its tight alliances with countries like China, Iran, North Korea, Syria and much of the Global South that now threaten the end of US global political, cultural and dollar hegemony.
The greatest irony is that as Zelenskiy worries about what he fantasizes as an ending to a non-existent Russian isolation, it is Zelenskiy himself who is now increasingly isolated. He has been, in effect, abandoned by president-elect Trump, even if the outgoing Biden-Blinken administration tries to prolong the war by pumping as much US taxpayer wealth as possible to Kiev before Trump takes office in January.
More important, as The Economist has recently confirmed, there is a strong interest in the US Deep State (whether or not known to Trump) in forcing elections on Kiev by May 2025, in that way bringing an end to the illegimate rule of what is now an unelected president of Ukraine and an unelected RADA and using election as the tool with which to prise Zelenskiy from power - it is presumed, I think accurately, that Zelenskiy will lose - in favor of somebody less fanatically obdurate such as General Zaluzhniy, currently Ukrainian ambassador to London. Zaluzhniy may or may not be acting in collaboration with former Ukrainian President Poroshenko.