As Joe Biden walked through Kiev on Monday, he was clearly unimpressed by the blaring air raid sirens. The message to Russian President Vladimir Putin was: the West will not give in.
“When Putin launched his invasion almost a year ago, he thought Ukraine was weak and the West divided,” Trump said during his surprise visit to Ukraine. “He thought he might surprise us. But he was completely wrong there.”
Biden is right. But the truth is that the West was also wrong. He had to withdraw assumed securities several times. Some have lasted longer, others shorter. Here are the three biggest mistakes:
Warnings of a Russian attack were abundant and early. As early as October 2021, at the G20 summit in Rome, US President Joe Biden pointed out to Germany and France that his secret services observed something alarming at the border with Ukraine: up to 90,000 Russian soldiers, including medical units.
In the summer, Vladimir Putin published a text denying Ukraine’s right to exist as an independent state. Yet it was not until well into February that the German government resolutely expected an attack by Putin. The US and Great Britain were faster there.
But not only did they have long-standing difficulties in convincing the Germans. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also remained skeptical until February. Does Russia just want to build pressure? To keep Ukraine away from the West? To hurt their economy?
No, Russia wanted to attack Ukraine. The federal government weighed the Americans’ alarming findings against those of its own federal intelligence agency. The BND is otherwise valued for its Russia expertise. This time he had apparently underestimated the explosiveness.
Even when Russian preparations for an invasion were completed in mid-February, the BND said they were unsure exactly what Putin was up to. And that at a time when the Germans already had information that Russia had brought blood to the Ukrainian border. You don’t need them to bluff.
The miscalculations should continue until February 24. This is how the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” reconstructed it in a detailed account of the months before the outbreak of war. Nothing illustrates this better than BND chief Bruno Kahl’s odyssey on the first day of the war.
Kahl had traveled to Kiev at the time. When the German embassy was evacuated on the evening of February 23, he did not want to go. He stayed to attend appointments the next day. But the next day there was war. And Kahl had to flee to Poland in an adventurous operation. The streets were blocked, tanks were closing in on him. It took 35 hours for the BND chief to be safe.
On February 24, 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. And if the experts had been right at the time, it would be long gone.
“Russian armed forces are much larger and more capable than Ukraine’s conventional army,” writes the American Institute for the Study of War in its analysis of the day. If Putin is determined, Russia is likely to beat Ukraine “in the next few days or weeks.”
The defense policy think tank was not alone in its assessment. It was the widespread tenor of the early days of the war, which also resonated in the governments of the West: Ukraine is unlikely to last much longer. Which initially also influenced the considerations to support Ukraine.
The United States recently offered to take Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to safety. The Ukrainian embassy in London spread Zelenskyy’s alleged response on Twitter: “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a lift.”
Selenskyj would not have turned down the offer so dramatically, but he remained in Kiev. And Ukraine fought back. Soon the Russian offensive made little progress. Some experts initially explained this by saying that Putin was preparing his troops for an attack on Kiev. To carry out his plan to quickly overthrow the Ukrainian government and replace it with pro-Moscow puppets.
In March, Russia attacked Kiev. But there was no success. Ukraine repelled Putin’s pincer attack and his soldiers were forced to retreat. And another prediction of the experts has not come true after a year of war: that Ukraine will fight bravely, but in the end the Russians will be overpowered.
In the beginning was Angela Merkel. It was she who once described the Russian gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 as a “purely private project”. Olaf Scholz has long endorsed this story. In mid-December, long after Russia assembled its troops on the Ukrainian border, the chancellor named the pipeline that.
Nord Stream 2 has never been apolitical. The actual construction of the pipeline began after Putin illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. Sigmar Gabriel, then vice-chancellor and minister of economic affairs in Merkel’s cabinet, recently said in an interview that the ceasefire negotiations in Donbass should not be jeopardized by stopping the pipeline. It hardly gets more political.
When Scholz claimed the opposite in mid-December, alarm bells had long been ringing in Berlin. At the time, Germany still obtained more than half of its gas from Russia. And had sold important gas infrastructure to Putin. Germany had become susceptible to blackmail.
What this meant concretely had long been clear: the Russian state-owned company Gazprom had almost completely emptied the largest gas storage in Rehden, Lower Saxony, in December. The Russians also closed the Yamal pipeline, which leads to Germany via Poland.
While Annalena Baebrock had called on the Greens to get out of the pipeline months earlier in the federal election campaign, calling it a “central geostrategic issue,” Scholz was scrupulous until February and didn’t even mention her publicly.
That led to tragicomic scenes, for example when Scholz stood next to Joe Biden in the White House in early February. The US president said at the press conference that if Russian troops cross the border into Ukraine, “Nord Stream 2 will no longer exist”. The German chancellor next to him dodged the questions.
Scholz only stopped the pipeline on February 22, after Putin declared the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics “independent”. Two days before the Russian invasion. The federal government has never imposed an import ban on Russian gas as a sanction against Putin. The dependence from which Germany had to laboriously free itself was too great.
Used sources:
(t online)
Soource :Watson
I am Amelia James, a passionate journalist with a deep-rooted interest in current affairs. I have more than five years of experience in the media industry, working both as an author and editor for 24 Instant News. My main focus lies in international news, particularly regional conflicts and political issues around the world.
