Can Olaf Scholz make up with Kyiv?
Can Olaf Scholz repair his battered relations with Kyiv?
The German chancellor arrived in the Ukrainian capital this morning alongside President Emmanuel Macron of France and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi for a historic joint trip. It’s the leaders’ first visit to Ukraine since the war began.
The aim of the trip is to demonstrate unwavering support, even as all three countries face accusations they could be doing a lot more to help.
There may have been a touch of frost to their reception. Mario Draghi’s government has urged the EU to call explicitly for a ceasefire in Ukraine and for peace talks with Russia, putting it at odds with the bloc’s more hardline members.
Macron is viewed with deep suspicion across Eastern Europe for his attempts to position himself as a mediator between Vladimir Putin and the West. His insistence that “Russia should not be humiliated” is taken as tacit support for carving up Ukraine in any peace deal, and he has run up a large telephone bill keeping in touch with the Russian President. Estonia’s PM, Kaja Kallas, said maintaining a dialogue was like negotiating with Hitler.
Scholz, meanwhile, is seen as not pulling his weight on providing military assistance, and being dishonest about the weight he is pulling. He has been evasive on the nature and extent of weapons shipments, often changing the story to suit his audience.
He raised eyebrows recently for his claim that “nobody supplies weapons on a similar scale to Germany.” It’s not true. Germany comes in fifth in terms of overall support for Ukraine, but slips to 13th when measured against its GDP. While Berlin is a big donor to the war effort, heavy weapons, howitzers and anti-aircraft tanks promised by Scholz months ago are yet to arrive.
Part of the explanation for the mixed messaging is that Scholz is trying to keep his own party on side. Many in the left-wing SDP are strongly opposed to Germany’s big rearmament push and its shipping of military hardware abroad, upending as it does decades of pacifist foreign policy. The SDP has traditionally believed that working with Russia was the best way to keep the peace in Europe. Gerhard Schroeder – the former SDP chancellor whose close links with the Kremlin have come to epitomise Germany’s discredited Russia policy – casts a long shadow over the party.
The face-to-face meeting on Ukrainian soil is a chance for Zelensky to turn the screws. “We need from Chancellor Scholz the certainty that Germany supports Ukraine,” the Ukrainian President said this week. “He and his government must decide: there can’t be a trade-off between Ukraine and relations with Russia.”
But Scholz knows full well that there can be. Although Germany cut its Russian gas imports by a third in the first 100 days of the war, it still shelled out €7.5bn to the Kremlin for the fuel, more than any other country. It amounts to around 10 per cent of Putin’s war bill.
It’s a raw geopolitical fact that photographs in flak jackets aren’t going to change.