Recent news from Germany should serve as a cautionary tale for others. Ukraine’s largest supporter in Europe has just decided to phase out military assistance to Ukraine by 2027. Germany has a fiscal problem and a political one, and with a year to go until the next general election, the German government has decided it would rather fund childcare facilities and the repair of bridges than the Ukrainian war effort.
Defence experts will be horrified to learn that defence spending is competing with kindergartens, but this is essentially what is happening in Germany now. In 2024, the country will spend about €7.5bn (£6.4bn) on Ukraine aid. I think a majority of Germans support this, but a significant minority does not. This has become more complicated amid reports that a Ukrainian commando blew up Nord Stream, the Baltic Sea pipeline on which Germany’s business model relied on until recently. There is no official link between these two events, but politically they are connected.
Right after the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022, Western intelligence services blamed Russia for a false-flag attack. There were rumours of Ukrainian involvement, but the false-flag story seemed more plausible. Sweden and Denmark both dropped their own investigations, but Germany’s fiercely independent prosecutor persisted. Earlier this year, the prosecutor’s office issued a European arrest warrant for the prime suspect, who was identified in the German media with a legally mandated abbreviation of the last name: Volodymyr Z. No relation, of course, to the Ukrainian president. Mr Z, a Ukrainian diving instructor, was thought to live in Poland when the arrest warrant was issued, but managed to leave the country before authorities could detain him.
On 14 August, the Wall Street Journal produced the first full account of what may have happened: a group of private citizens from Ukraine decided to blow up the pipelines. They organised the mission and informed president Volodymyr Zelensky. The story quoted a US source as saying that Zelensky initially agreed, but later changed his mind. I was reminded of Bill Clinton’s assertion that he smoked but did not inhale. In any case, the political damage to Ukraine is enormous.
The German government played it cool, referring all questions from journalists to the prosecutor. The revelation, though, makes it harder to justify a multi-billion aid package at a time when this has become a politically divisive issue.
Sahra Wagenknecht, who heads a radical left-wing party, has accused Ukraine of sabotage. Now that Ukrainian citizens are being implicated in the explosion of the pipeline, her message rings louder than that of Ukraine’s supporters. The far-right Alternative for Germany, too, is demanding an end to aid. September will see elections in three eastern German states where the two parties are doing well in the opinion polls. If they succeed, it would be another warning for the governing coalition in Berlin, which faces its own elections in 2025.
On the day of the explosions, Radosław Sikorski, then an MEP and now Poland’s foreign minister, tweeted: “Thank you, USA.” After the WSJ story broke, the Polish prime minister Donald Tusk responded to the backlash against Ukraine, tweeting: “To all the initiators and patrons of Nord Stream 1 and 2. The only thing you should do today about it is apologise and keep quiet.”
Even Germans who regret the entire Nord Stream project will certainly not apologise. It is far from clear that the fragile coalition of Ukraine supporters in Germany will hold if further revelations of Ukrainian involvement in the plot emerge.
To some extent, this problem is specifically German. But with a foreseeable decline in US and German enthusiasm for the Ukrainian war effort, the whole support operation is at risk. And why would other European countries agree to cover for Germany? The Germans are perhaps more uptight about public finances than others, but financially all nations are in a similar situation.
What alarms me is the way the German coalition wants to plug the financial gap for Ukraine. The idea is to come up with a €50bn (£42bn) loan backed by the interest on Russian assets. This sounds eerily similar to the decisions that triggered the global financial crisis. You cannot replace real money and aid with fake money: there is no way that Ukraine could ever repay a €50bn loan.
If countries want to support an open-ended war against Russia, it will cost a lot of money. They will need to budget for this. It requires governments and oppositions to agree. This is still the case in the UK, but not in the US and Germany: the Germans have begun to dislike the idea of doing whatever it takes to help Ukraine win the war.
I don’t think Ukraine’s insurgence into the Russian oblast of Kursk will make much of a difference to this debate. It provided some positive headlines after a year of mostly dreadful news. But on the front lines within Ukraine, where Russia has the upper hand, the situation remains bleak.
By phasing out support for Ukraine, Germany is putting a time limit on the war – one that will force Ukraine to accept the partition of its country along some frontier, not too long from now.
The Western strategy, if you want to call it that, had been to win an endurance game against Vladimir Putin. I always thought this was too clever by half. And now, the Germans have blinked.
[See also: Germany is on the brink of economic decline]
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This article appears in the 21 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Christian Comeback