As of: February 19, 2024, 11:42 a.m
By: Georg Anastasiadis
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The West has to do more to counter Putin than the SiKo, comments Georg Anastasiadis.
© Tobias Schwarz/dpa
Navalny's death, Avdiivka's case: Kremlin boss Putin gave the security conference in Munich a hard lesson.
A comment by Georg Anastasiadis.
The West has never been seen as unsettled, even desperate, as at the 2024 Security Conference.
Putin's psychological war was in full effect in Munich: at the opening of the Siko, the Kremlin boss presented his two terrible trophies - the death of the resistance icon Alexei Navalny and the conquest of the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka, which has long been hotly contested.
It was the second moment of shock in Munich after Putin's speech in 2007. The divided West, on the other hand, had to lick its wounds.
Munich Security Conference: Vice Chancellor Habeck provided the plain text
In Washington, US President Biden accused Trump supporters in Congress of being complicit in the city's symbolic fall by blocking aid to Kiev.
And there was also a lot of dissatisfaction with the Chancellor after his Siko speech, which stopped at describing the bleak situation instead of giving a clear answer to Putin's brutal declaration of war.
If Olaf Scholz intended to deliver Taurus missiles to Ukraine, this would have been the appropriate moment to announce it.
If information from informed circles is correct, according to which the Chancellor had previously prevented himself and Presidents Macron, Tusk and Zelensky from meeting in Munich to jointly sign the agreed bilateral security agreements with Ukraine, the Berlin head of government would be in even greater need to explain.
Instead, Economics Minister Robert Habeck delivered the clear text that Scholz had actually hoped for with his - unfortunately two years late - call to his own traffic light government to finally shift up two gears and ramp up arms production, which requires long-term purchase contracts with the manufacturers and thus more money (and probably... also debts) for defense - for which the Greens rightly took the reluctant Union to task.
A turning signal must come from this Siko of the helpless
“Without security, everything else is nothing” was the sentence that stuck with me from the Chancellor’s speech.
But now it can't just be a matter of words anymore.
A turning signal must come from this Siko of the helpless.
The overdue delivery of Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine, the ramp-up of production of weapons and, above all, ammunition, the debate about a European nuclear defense umbrella with France and Poland, a new EU arms commissioner, the provision of the massive resources needed for the new reality Financial resources - all of this must be on the table now if the sacrifices of the heroically fighting Ukrainians are not to be in vain and Europe does not want to wait until Putin attacks the next country.
But the Chancellor must finally muster the will to lead.