A bit of history… German tanks going to fight against the Russian army on the plains of Ukraine, that brings back dark memories. And even though these memories are now 80 years old, 2023 and 1943 are very different, and important details of this past tragedy are neglected or concealed… nevertheless, it sticks and it hurts.
Germany is reluctant to approve the supply of tanks to the Ukrainian army ” German Quality (the famous Leopard 1s and 2s held by a dozen European armies), which kyiv cries out for, maintaining that every day of hesitation kills Ukrainians.
A country guided, since 1945, by a pacifist ideal, even if it is simultaneously a major producer of armaments, Germany has retained a historical guilt complex vis-à-vis Russia as a successor state to the USSR — the USSR attacked in June 1941 by the Third Reich (after having been its ally).
The irony is that this (understandable and morally justified) reluctance is now circumvented by a lack of knowledge of the details.
When the German Panzers entered Ukraine in 1941-1942, the Nazi army committed atrocities there… against Soviet soldiers (many of them Ukrainians) and against Ukrainian civilians, Jews and non-Jews. Most people in Ukraine experienced the episode as a savage invasion and a tragedy.
All this to say that a moral impulse based on less selective memories… could have resulted in an opposite reflex, which could give: “We Germans invaded and massacred the Ukrainians. Today, 80 years later, they are invaded and massacred. We must therefore help them, including if necessary with German tanks. »
This type of argument is moreover taken up – roughly speaking – by half of the Germans against the other half, in the specific debate on the advisability of supplying or not supplying tanks to the Ukrainian army.
Berlin’s reluctance in this tank story certainly has other explanations. There are in Germany genuine radical pacifists, for whom any participation, even indirect, in a war is an ignominy.
This tendency intersects with another: the fraction—minority but not negligible—of German opinion which is sensitive, even sympathetic, to the Russian point of view. A famous example: the former Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who after 2005 became a paid agent for Moscow’s interests.
The pacifist point of view, falsely neutral, amounts to saying to the Ukrainians: “We are not taking sides. You just have to surrender to avoid the massacres. “Speech heard from February 2022… not only in Germany.
The pacifists are very present within the SPD and the Greens, members of the ruling coalition. Chancellor Olaf Scholz is obliged to take this into account.
Even haunted by their past warmongering, a majority of Germans still support the idea of backing the Ukrainians. But at each stage for 11 months, Berlin has been quibbling over the details and slowing down the process, as we see again this time.
One of Scholz’s key arguments: we must decide “by consensus”. Above all, Germany does not want to take the blame in an “escalation” against Russia, a real obsession.
However, at the Ramstein meeting last Friday, there were all the same 54 States represented around the table (which makes quite a lot of people around the “isolated West”) with a necessarily difficult consensus. But, apart from the tanks, promises of aid of all kinds have poured in: combat vehicles, armored vehicles on wheels (which sometimes come close to the level of tanks on tracks), heavy artillery, anti-aircraft defence, ammunition…
The fixation on the question of tanks may have a real strategic basis: some analysts maintain that 250 of these behemoths, well supervised, could allow the Ukrainians, this spring, to break through the Russian defenses and retake the provinces of Kherson and Zaporijjia.
But it also has a symbolic function: we are witnessing a theatrical drama in which it is a question of bringing down German defences…of another type.
François Brousseau is an international business analyst at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]