Podcast: Waffenlieferungen für die Ukraine - wer sagt was und warum? | Lanz & Precht

Land and Brecht, good morning Richard, good morning Markus, I hope you are well, I wanted to talk to you today about what happened in the early morning of February 24, 2022. We will not forget that morning when Putin attacked. In Ukraine, over the weeks, almost exactly a year since then, we have seen an incredible amount of suffering, we have experienced great surprises, we have seen the crazy bravery of Ukraine on the one hand, this terrifying weakness, the corruption on the other. side of the Russian military, this callousness when it comes to killing civilians and raping them tomorrow I greeted Paul Ronsheimer, who was in kyiv two days ago again and said that Russians are still dying en masse at a ratio of about 5 to 1, so that there is bloodshed on both sides.

I'm wondering how to access these numbers, so if I've learned anything this year, I don't believe in any numbers at all. I don't believe in any at all, so I give. the number of the US Head of State who spoke of 200,000 dead and 100,000 seriously injured. On the Russian side 100,000 on the Ukrainian side now you are quoting the Ronsheimer ratio of 1 to 5 then Ukraine always publishes some figures showing exactly how many Russian soldiers were killed where I always wondered who does the counting and where you know yes drones , drones, they know a lot, so now I found out from Sönke Knights that I saw this army on video tomorrow, I absolutely appreciate it and he said that the Ukrainian general staff of the Ukrainian army almost does not give any reliable information, even to the West.

That means that he says that we are better informed about the conditions of the Russian army than the Ukrainian one and it means that even NATO, for example, is not well informed about it and that is why I suppose that we do not know the real number of victims of any of the sides, we don't even know exactly, but the only thing I can imagine is that it is simply indescribable. suffering and if we take this benchmark of 200,000 dead and seriously injured that the Americans talk about, then it's just an incredible number, yes it is, I just want to.

Also, when you say that we are better informed about the Russian figures, I think this is indisputable after this year, especially by the Russians, who always send these human waves there, which is exactly what they are doing now again, they It is supposed to be a tactic of war and under which an incredible number of people die and then new ones keep coming and whether in the end it is three to one, four to one or five to one, each one of them is a tragedy. , but I wanted something completely different to be sure, there is always It's not actually the anniversary of February 24th, but there is another anniversary after this February 24th, a date that I think we still don't pay enough attention to when it comes to this war and also the question of where the solution lies.

At some point, when will this finally end? And it's the Olympic Games on February 4 in Beijing, what do you remember? There is this crazy image, there are these two men, Putin, sitting here in this almost empty stadium and They watch the Olympic Games and shortly before they have promised each other a friendship without limits and if you think about it, maybe we can do it again today in the course of this conversation with the Chinese, then you come to the conclusion that this is the fourth time in February, a lot more things happened than we actually perceived.

It was always the big question that the Chinese would give the Russians carte blanche to wage a war of aggression against Ukraine, okay, no, no, no, no, okay, but that's very controversial and there wasn't one in the room except the two of them, but I hear people who deal with that say that research now tends to assume that they at least had an idea that something would happen and then, but and that in turn speaks clearly However, that they really were informed about The scope of the dimension is very interesting, it took the Chinese about a week to find a language and a clear position on this war.

They also began to evacuate people from their embassy in kyiv and so This means that they were also taken by surprise and it was not in their interest. It may be too general to say. I learned from Frank Sieieren's book on China that the Chinese are investing in Ukraine on a large scale. must have invested in Ukraine. Now maybe this applies to ports and this applies very much to infrastructure, which is also something that is also being done in other Eastern European countries, including EU countries, in Hungary for example. , and yes, well, I mean these Eastern European countries, in particular Hungary or something like that, which we consider problematic EU member states, Serbia, yes, and then they will do big business in Ukraine and, if I understood you correctly, He tried to explain that to me.

He had no interest in the war. So they were against the war and secondly that they have no interest in the West winning this war and Ukraine becoming part of Europe and therefore perhaps no longer an ideal partner for you , the Chinese, and that I have no interest in a Russian victory because then that will end for them too and I think there will be a lot to see because this volume of investment in Ukraine was enormous. I don't even know if any other country has invested as much in Ukraine in recent years as China, which is interesting because in this document it says not pledging this great friendship, so to speak, or pledging this limitless friendship, I looked at it, they're like 14 pages, it is very interesting that this is "The language that is sometimes really escalating, is aggressive.

It says there that NATO should please stop expanding further. On the other hand, you are, so to speak, ensuring the loyalty of Russia when it comes to Taiwan and saying that it is a great China and that is non-negotiable for us, but this point with NATO, for example, is a reference to states being sovereign this sound that says that our democracy speaks of their own democracy is mostly as good as yours, that's very, very interesting and then this war breaks out and at first there's no real language which obviously surprises you but then it says There's a moment at some point when a Chinese government spokesperson says, you may remember this, who says what did you expect when you corner a country as big as Russia and put it against the wall, so to speak, push the wall, what do they have? hope that this means that this narrative this narrative is identical to the Russian exactly the Russians who, so to speak, from the Evil West towards the world wage war as wars of self-defense, a great imperial war, yes, and through the lens china, what you say is correct, there was a little later, a week ago, they pointed it out and said: "Well, we are a peace-loving country and we want them to talk to each other.

A few days ago there was another diplomatic escalation. All the Speakers somewhere said that the Americans should stop supplying weapons here because it is actually the others who have an interest in this war, which means that there is already a very cold consideration, I think, that simply says well, what good is it to us? ?I also think that this friendship doesn't really exist Potato, yes, the fact that she marries Putin is exactly a good thing, but it has been better in recent years than this devastating situation has always been in the past, for what they have already faced militarily in a very bad way, between Maro and the Union there are dead enmity and that is more what you can say, adoptive brothers and it is not exactly love little brother but the view through the Chinese glasses is really interesting emergency seen through Chinese glasses I would say that is not the case.

It is completely wrong that there is now. someone Putin who is employing the West in this way, which is also weakening us, all of this is costing us a lot of money, it is also costing the Americans a lot of money, so I think that is definitely something that the Chinese are doing, weighing things coldly. "Let's see what happens. It's purely a matter of information because I don't know exactly and because I hear contradictory things: from the United States' perspective, is the war economically worth it or is it a big economic problem?" The argument in favor of this is, on the one hand, the entire order book of the arms industry, which is more important to the US than its automobile industry, is by far the largest and most important industry for Germany and, Of course, it benefits from wartime and whoever orders the Americans around.

The weapons that are now in the world should actually represent a huge economic benefit and speaks against that, and that is perhaps also the reason why the New York Times' trusted word questioned them both so much, exactly yes, that the international financial world and possibly I also say because the high-tech world of Silicon Valley or something like that had no interest in this confrontation. They are interested because the advocates of absolute globalization and free trade around the world benefit from it: the larger the markets, the more movement. The less direct confrontation there is, the better, so I have the feeling that the question it's whether the United States benefits economically or not.

That's not only a very interesting point, Richard, I spoke to Janker Oertel about it this morning, best regards, The place I really appreciate has a lot to do with China, a very intelligent woman who said this in response to exactly this question because that is one of the central accusations, if you look at the big picture and we are trying to do that today as well, This story that always exists, well, the Americans are the ones who benefit the most from the fact that this war does not stop and they also do others in the West and have stocks of purely metal and other German companies, but I only want That's why I said others too so that everyone benefits.

She said Dresden, just think about who pays for it and that's true, of course, what's true is the weapons that the Americans are now sending to Ukraine. We did not deliver them to Ukraine but to the United States. the taxpayers who paid for them. These weapons are actually simply borrowed or read, so there is no need to return them at some point. They are actually all delivered whether they are given or not, but they have to be produced first and will be paid for at some point later. So if the EU becomes after the war, we firmly assume that Ukraine will still exist after this war, yes that is our opinion anyway and would then be rebuilt with incredible sums, probably triple digit billions. , maybe billions or something like that and then would there be a possibility of paying the debts he owes due to the delivery of weapons?

You could get guarantees on the natural gas you have in the Black Sea or stakes in companies or not. I don't know what or something like that. I'm not sure yet, but that's what I also know. No, I haven't found or read anything good about it, as far as I know, these weapons are not all given away. "I can't imagine that either. I just don't know, but I can still imagine that what's happening now costs an economy money and that weakened us and, when we look at it through the Chinese lens, I don't think it's uninteresting." ".

It's also interesting to take a look. Then I presented a counterargument and said: well, just like you, this military machine is, above all, American, a big technological driver, absolutely the same as in Israel, for example in Israel, one of the reasons why there is a such a lively startup scene is precisely this Israeli military machine, which means that they are driving technological developments and so on, and I think I have already talked about it here, there is a direct connection. between the Pentagon and the great technological giants of Silicon Valley, the development of the Internet, etc., all of which is not conceivable without the strategic support of the American State and the interest of the military is exactly what is also explained and also explained In fact. interesting.

I don't think many people know why they dare to draw a red line when the American state comes and says I want your data, but there are connections and cross-connections. Silicon Valley was there from the beginning, among other things. in the interests of the US military and state funding, of course, so it was not later that the secret service and the army arrived, but from the beginning with the ship and when that happened it was incredibly exciting what was behind it, for example the flight to the moon, yes, I admit it and so on, that's where it all started.

Janka Oertel says it's very interesting, she says it was like that in the Cold War, she says that today they are so independent, today technological progress moves so fast that actually the military is no longer needed for that, she says it's more the other way around and he's setting a very good example of drones coming from the civilian sector and at some point the military recognized the possibility of drones and said, "Okay." pay attention, then we will now also use it for reconnaissance transport or even shells to carry rockets as we are seeing now in the Ukrainian war, which is very interesting, but I have the feeling that the question of what interest the Chinese had in This war also emerged a year ago that is still clearly underexposed and they are fooling the worldmaking you believe that there is such neutrality but it does not exist, I know this from many current conversations, I remember Norbert Röttgen, who said this on a very occasion.

Now they supply the Russian defense industry with a gigantic quantity of semiconductor chips that they themselves can produce, quantity which has been doubled. The Russians, in turn, benefit from the Chinese because they sell them oil. buy it, which can then be sold at a fairly low price and sometimes can be sold on the world market. It's all incredibly treacherous and it's very difficult to get these figures because the Russians stopped publishing trade figures and balance sheets at the beginning of the war. , which means that there is a science like that, that's how he explained it to the partners that I care about now, to be able to use figures from other countries to indirectly conclude what the Russians are really doing and what is really happening there, and then you know it's also from the Chinese perspective, for example, and then I'm also hearing something interesting.

The experiment gives the most traded currency on the Moscow Stock Exchange, the hyenas, the Chinese currency now and the idea, so to speak, of Try something. Yes, the Chinese are afraid of receiving a harsh dollar penalty, for example, at some point if they overdraw. If it trades only two point five percent, I believe that all world trade is carried out through the Chinese currency. Everything else is dominated by the dollar and the euro, but above all the dollar dominates. That means we have to see what happens if we suddenly sell our raw materials, oil, for example Russian oil, trading in our own currency, creating our own currency.

It is much more important to make new exchanges until you can say develop routines. I think all of this is largely in China's interest and that's why this story is consistent with how to stay completely out of this, we are neutral, the story is a fairy tale. story, yes Well, how can you, as a great power and as an economic superpower, China have a completely neutral position in a situation like this? It is clear that they do not have it, so one can positively say that the Chinese certainly did not have it. Not to break this war, no and um the Chinese want and that's what I said before, that neither side wins, they don't want the Russians to win either, but they don't want the Russians to lose for their lives because the West has proclaimed the era of an almost bipolar world order.

You can say that they are, so to speak, the walls of the time to a large extent, that is, something like this complements the rest and something like this is very First of all, it is not China and then other countries that are strongly associated with China and that are more and more Russia and enough has often been said, war with all its consequences leads to a hardening of the blocs and the hardening of the blocs is that China and Russia, who really did not like each other very well, are getting closer increasingly, that's a consequence of this war, right, and that's a consequence that China probably benefits from much more than Russia, what's going on?

You must not forget that the Chinese did not start these wars and we are trying to provoke this war, you know who else is a user, Kim Jong-un for that reason. Nobody talks anymore because he doesn't have that at all. "I think he always likes it when the world talks about him. Do you think not? In fact, I think he's one of the big beneficiaries. That's how people who know the world very well describe him and say it. Now he's gotten closer very seriously to China. Yes, they are not at all interested in the fact that it is constantly firing new fun nuclear missiles into the air.

Why not? Because, of course, they see that in China, South Korea and Japan, for example , pacifist Japan is arming itself because This war is really going on because they are afraid of what I in pink will do next, what about partial goods and all kinds of things and that is why they have no interest in Kim Jong-un test rockets because the more rockets are fired into the air The South Koreans, Japanese and others will feel more threatened and as a result they will become more and more aware and China does not want to be surrounded by people from states and singles that they are actually hostile towards them and that in turn they are now starting a real spiral of weaponization, so that is what is happening right now, which is really dangerous, do you mean that the time of freedom for the fools of North Korea is over?

I don't know if they will definitely benefit from it, no, so the Chinese have to keep them. in a good mood and I'll just say no if there's a problem. It's also very interesting to compare North Korea and Ukraine, so the lesson, even after a year of this war, is that if you have nuclear weapons, then don't have them. Make the mistake of giving them away, that's what Ukraine did and if you don't have any then make sure you get some. Well, that would be exactly the same story as in 1994, well, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons.

If Ukraine had not given up its nuclear weapons back then, it would never have been truly clear as a state. Not that they had thought about it for a long time, let's do that, we won't do that, no. , that was a condition that Russia set and without it independence would not have been possible. It just has to be said, that's why it may be a historical error. There was no alternative, totally true, but the lesson of this was a cynical one. The lesson of this is that if you have nuclear weapons then basically nothing can happen, that's what someone like Kim Jong-un relies on and that now leads to this improvement spiral that I think can also be very, very dangerous.

There will be a new arms race in East Asia with a very uncertain outcome and the trigger is again what emerged in Ukraine a year ago in China and Sakreis, and if there are shocks like the brutal Russian war of aggression, you can imagine that in the Today's globalized world everything affects everything. We have often talked about what this means for Africa. The stock markets are skyrocketing right now, wheat prices, yes, that will trigger gigantic humanitarian catastrophes, that was what was always feared if the war continues. for a long time yes, that will lead to famine catastrophes in Africa.

We continue to provoke exactly that most grain ships we have also talked about it. If you don't leave Ukraine, don't leave them for Africa because there could be a gigantic catastrophe as a result of the Ukraine war, so we could spend the whole episode just talking about the secondary consequences, yes, this exactly 24 I completely agree with you Richard, I only expressly agree with one sentence Don't say that We are provoking that we did not provoke this war when you said before that the Chinese did not start this war, nor did we. We didn't start the war.

I didn't say that for God's sake. No, but we are a party of indirect war, we are not a direct distributor of war, we support parties of indirect war through Ukraine and in this sense we are part of this war, however, careful wording now will be no, exactly , exactly, I have thought about This week you always think about yourself, as you know, but if this week was particularly frequent and in two interesting places, the first place was with Lula Scholz on a visit to Brazil, it was really interesting to see how this story, Do you remember what this Chinese speaker said before?

What do you think? What happens if you just corner a big country like Russia like that? Yes, Lula, the Brazilian president, I mean, Scholz will go there, it's about raw materials. materials, it's about lithium, yes, we need it Lithium will take an unimaginable direction in the coming decades, we have already talked about it several times, without imagining a catastrophe because lithium is obtained in this way, yes, there is no other way right now, yes, when you see this salt being drained, so to speak, and the song that tells you that all the dust will be on the fields in winter and that it is very poisonous, etc., but that is a different topic, lithium.

It's not exactly a harmless topic, it's not at all interesting, then we'll go back to being like us. We do this because, as far as I know, lithium is also available in Germany, but we will do it similarly to rare earths. , which was also interesting a few weeks ago in northern Sweden. It was invented, I don't know, and there weren't many. But if you can stock up, there are plenty here too, by the way. Somehow, we could extract them here too, not to this extent, but we could and since that is also a gigantic environmental disaster, similar to lithium, we say then leave it in Sweden.

We have nothing left to do, but please. on our phone of course, that's where we need it, that's right Lola, yes, Scholz actually wants the Brazilians, you know, they still have ammunition for the cheetah. That's crazy, they have ammunition for that. We would like to have them to send to Ukraine and Dula does not say yes to mom, but the Chinese are a very, very important commercial thread for Brazil and Lula also tried to put himself in a third party position to say that we are really neutral and so truly neutral, we could provide a forum for negotiations, the problem is, remember, France and Germany used to be a forum with the Minsk Agreement and today we are clearly defined not only as morally humanitarian on the side of Ukraine but also militarily, that is why that we can no longer assume the role of mediators and are desperately searching all the time.

Yes, we have Erdogan he can do something like that. Furthermore, we will not have a really relaxed relationship and now Brazil does not offer itself only as a State, yes, but more or less as a host for negotiations or as a base, and that is good. I mean, everything that is possible in terms of negotiations has to be exploited at some point because the compromise is definitely right, even if the stupid guy told you yes, but every war ends with negotiations and at some point, I mean , I think actually between us, I'm sure there will be negotiations all the time, so there will be no negotiations, so to speak, that we are about to conclude some kind of peace, yes, but those are diplomatic channels, there are German ambassadors in Moscow, etc., where there is a constant exchange of ideas about these things, I think.

I can't imagine any other way, if these people are paid to do this, where are we very, very far from a solution? And I know that as long as the Russians are there now, they haven't gotten what they want. "They will not enter into negotiations, they will probably not even freeze the current status quo. That was always my hope before they had the military successes of the last few weeks, which were paid for in blood, but before they had them, I always had the hope that that we could at least freeze it for a while, but right now that's probably not even possible, so to be honest, I don't think we'll be able to get out of it at all in the future.

By the way, I have a theory as to why Lula the Scholz, you have to look at the number of the Brazilian foreign trade balance, 30 percent of Brazilian exports go to China and then we have this same issue again, for the moment. By the way, I have Richard, maybe we can talk about it Ivan Kastev, who you really appreciate, you already met him on my program, it was a complete program, it was a great program, yes, mega, you have to look at the media library, really cool. there is also such a wonderful book from which it was turned off the light that is a great book in Bulgarian is Bulgarian exactly intellectual let's let a great guy who says yes how does this war end who says um wars simply die wars are ducks in the polls 2024 the elections are in Russia the elections of 2024 They are in the United States and he brazenly says that he could do something about this war.

I believe that too. Yes, I believe that. In fact, in the United States we still don't know who is against whom and who is really against Trump. or if it's someone else on both sides, so when I see someone in front of the microphone I always think to myself that there won't be another term and if Trump really survives all of this and then in the end again somehow. like ten times I can't imagine that a counted boxer will get back up, although with him you never know, you have to take everything into account, no, but he already said that he would end the war quickly, that would probably be the In this case, yes, then yeah, I guess he'll be in on the deal, yeah, I mean, getting into some kind of dirty deal.

I don't even want to imagine what it will look like, but I could imagine it, it could also be that the United States will be tired by 2024. That is possible, but that would be bad Richard, have you thought about it because I didn't mean that I wanted the next Trump deal, I wanted something different, didn't you want? I want to push you into a weird corner here, I just wanted to tell you that the sentence could be bad. You can also misunderstand. I just want to tell you, imagine for a second that we don't support Ukraine now or that Ukraine can't anymore. recruit people who are now over 60 years old, then we will run out of ammunition and personnel and simply attack the fighters.

It's all very, very bitter and them not losing this war is anything but a foregone conclusion, no matter how much we support or so the question is what the defeat would be, that can exactly so there are two conceivable defeats, which is one defeat The Russians get what they don't yet have in Don and what they don't "Not yetwe have done it in Saporisha and then we will somehow build a corresponding wall and say that we will continue to shoot at them and what if they do not guarantee us that they will not join NATO and now set a military upper limit.

A small variant." The big variant is, of course, if the Ukrainian army is actually defeated. Yes, that you then do what I suspect you did not intend to do to that extent from the beginning, but that you then go through again here. But that is also the question of whether you could expect that from the Russian population, because for a siege here that you cannot even imagine, the first time it was a half-phony attack, it must be said, so half-hearted attacks are not They are more than my "In this case, the Americans, there was a strange conversation that did not move from the place.

Attacks Attacks on airports in the north of kyiv, but to hell with kyiv was the headline of the Bild newspaper every day, so when I think about the war cave in Dresden or if I think about a war cave in Tokyo and the Second War World Cup, that hasn't been the case so far, but then it would be exactly I think I know, that's why I consider this this this, so to speak, this smaller victory is more likely than the big one, but you know, at the end of the day , what would be the consequence, so to speak, if the Russians defeat Ukraine, that they then take control? then take control of a completely devastated country, completely destroyed all the time.

I can't see that, I can't even imagine that they can. Russia cannot rebuild Ukraine at all. So I can't imagine they can do that completely. Because the country is torn apart and then completely bled dry, the gross domestic product is reduced every year by 30% with the war economy, so many young people of the younger generation lost all the traumas, the damages of the war , the houses destroyed. Who wants to have that in the sense of the conqueror taking over, so to speak, then I think it's a little more likely without having a clue, nobody knows, we don't like to talk to ourselves, yes, I think that too, so that's not the case anyway.

But then it's more likely that the goal is not to capture all of Ukraine. That's a guess, yes, but I can't really imagine it. I just thought about it to the end if that was possible. It happened and that was it. Obviously, at least at the beginning, the plan was that you would then take control of this battered country and then you would have a guerrilla war that would last for years and decades, Ukraine would continue to develop for more and more generations. more and more until the end, that would be catastrophic, I can't imagine that anyone would be so crazy that they would seriously think about it and think again about my siege on KEF with all that that means, I really don't think so. but I don't know, unfortunately yes, if I know, no one knows, or not, but it has to be done.

Yes, think about scenarios, the big question on Richard's mind after this year is still the question of motive for me. I have often talked about it, you can often read that there are actually wars of this kind, I mean, we are talking about tanks again. When we were driving through the area we all thought it was something retro, that no one does that anymore. , but they are a very traditional warrior, nasty and brutal, sometimes with trench warfare like in World War I, and I had a very interesting encounter with them this week. Conversation again behind the scenes with Joe Käser, the first of Siemens, an interesting man, very sensible and said some smart things, has met Putin several times, described in the program how, so to speak, he met Putin three times, 14 two times ago he met with Putin, who was very open. towards Germany, etc., who wanted to do business, who wanted to build his country, who then met with Putin again in 2014 and described it as a mistake shortly after the annexation of Crimea and then experienced a completely different Putin, someone who , first of all, I denied all this and then I blamed the best people for it anyway and the history of NATO and so on and then I met two people again in Sochi if I had it right in my head and he told me about this meeting again and said it was crazy.

It was a conversation that was scheduled to last 20 minutes, then it lasted more than an hour and 50 minutes. That was his feeling, Putin just spouted particularly insulting verbal garbage about Merkel, about the West, about NATO, about NATO. There he met an incredibly angry man and he kept telling him President, if you have a problem with the German Chancellor, you have to talk to her, I'm completely the wrong person to contact, I'm here for Siemens and then he said there was this moment in the one who then told him that if you don't seriously build a structure here with us, Siemens, then we will kick you out and then pointed out that it was very interesting.

I didn't know that Siemens has a big and deep connection with Russia. I was jokingly informed that Werner von Siemens and I believe his brother Karl were in real trouble at one point, they were actually bankrupt when they founded the company in 185054, and it was the Russian Tsar who provided them with fresh money back then and ensured that Siemens continued to exist, so in the corporate culture of Siemens there is something, a deep connection, if you will, with Russia, and it was with those who are in charge of Siemens and have an overview of this historical dimension that in the beginning was a difficult step for them to leave Russia completely because culturally they were incredibly connected to them.

You have to say many, many centuries and it was very interesting that it was not clear to me, but I said we had to do it now, that would not be a question at all, but the anger of this man, this hatred towards the West, that really impressed him and the explanation for it. That would be amazing, since he explained in great detail that he says a Secret Service agent thinks exactly in the categories of loyalty and bicycles and that is basically Putin's psychological DNA and because NATO's expansion to the East was contrary to the promise more or less formulated in the 1997 NATO Russia Law, Putin felt betrayed afterwards, and said this. very clearly at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, in the sense that we had an agreement, they did not fulfill it, we are becoming more and more isolated here and to the same extent you can say yes, even in parallel to the expansion every NATO's expansion, Putin's heart hardened so, to use this biblical formulation, yes, the heart of Pharaoh against the Israelites, so we have a parallel development, so to speak, with the expansion of NATO, yes, the friendly Putin of the Bundestag is to become the Putin we know today step by step and that's basically what happened psychologically and we also know it from all the people who always warned, so Helmut Schmidt first of all said, hey, have take into account Russian security interests and we can't just do that and so on.

NATO, in turn, has argued that if these shadows want to enter NATO then it is hand in hand with sovereign right and free decision and if they feel threatened by Russia, yes, how justified. Even now we would say it. It was very justified then it was not so justified so we will do it and these are the two streams of arguments that still oppose each other today, those who say yes, it was their right and lo and behold, it was still good that they did it and the others They say that if we hadn't even started with that then we wouldn't have had this whole fateful event that led to this devastating catastrophe in Ukraine and the truth is that that's what bothered me all the time Don Don't both stories coincide? "What I have learned throughout this year is to listen to many stories, so that I don't have to make a single interpretation of the whole thing when I am in Russia under threat," he said.

The Russians don't see Germany in NATO, they see the United States, they haven't forgotten the time when the blocs clashed, now they see themselves virtually surrounded by the enemy, so that's an understandable story, but it's not the whole story. . It also includes that the Soviet Union was a colonial empire that had colonies right on its doorstep. They were all Russian colonies, basically, where they controlled everything from Moscow and just had the products right at their doorstep and like a colonial empire, yeah, the Russians have this claim that it's actually us, that it belongs to us, it may not be fully functional like us, but they belong to us and if they then buy American weapons or do business with the USA, etc., then Putin thinks of betrayal in this category and to the same extent that he felt humiliated by nature for the expansion to the same extent that he became a National Socialist National Revanist he germinated great fantasies about I don't know if so much only in his head at least in Russia and the strongest opposition, if in Russia the term opposition is allowed, yes, these are the nationalists, they are, so to speak, the ultra-Russian AFD, these are the people who are most likely to put pressure on him.

Yes, and little by little he has been adopting many of his ideas and that is Putin, we live like this today and when I tell the story like that I always see it from two sides. I see, so to speak, what it is from a Russian perspective and what it is what it is from a Western perspective and why I can't say what it is in what it is in what then, oh, that's what happened without having to evaluate it, so I have a somewhat logical explanation of how this violation of international law and this war of aggression arose.

Yeah, I think it's about nature, I think it's all that. To be honest, for hocus pocus and propaganda, um, I have to remember. You who sometimes even wanted to join NATO, eh, but that's pulling out NATO's teeth if you participate yourself, otherwise the big guy has an interesting theory that says that there is a man in my eyes who is not even the younger and he now, at 70 years old, I have to say what I have really achieved, it is about my life's work Russia is economically complete in the abyss zero transformation works Russians today are poorer than ever and I don't I think they have that right now, but you look at them anyway, no, but at least in the same newspaper, so it's a post-communist country.

Yes, China is now a capitalist country with, so to speak, communist frosting on top, in a way. with a good star attached, which is a very capitalist state capitalism, yes to a large extent, but not really communist and if you look at this success story and then you look at Putin's story at the same time, then it was the first five years. is actually a success story because you don't have 45% economic growth and then comes the great stagnation, then comes the breakup, just then a mafia type system takes over the whole country, so to speak, and people become obscenely rich in a way, until this At night it was already 20% before the honest system also advertised pages there, yes, but a new system is emerging with Putin as a web like a spider in the web, yes, and before it was, so to speak, an anarchist oligarchic system with tomorrow and hired killers and the worst way now, so you can say: "Maybe the mafia rules and then the state mafia reacts.

Yes, that's well said, I'm just trying to get to that point."Not today, so the Russians have a lot of Russians at night, 20% of the Russians still don't have my bathroom in their apartment or in their house, just to talk about my low per capita income that like people in Turkey etc. So if you say that didn't work and if you have so much raw materials, so much oil, so much natural gas, then you're always going to have to wonder what the heck you really did with all of this. money, it's unimaginable that nothing has been achieved and, um, I think that's why someone like rude Def says that it's actually about national territory, the Russians now have 18% of Ukrainian territory, it's about industry , it's also about work, it's actually something else that's pretty big.

Village after village, the Russians are a dying people, they have too low a training rate, yes, and they are becoming more and more insignificant in quantitative terms. That's what millions in Ukraine wanted. but not the country, so that is the power of the thesis. I think you're right about the demographic factor and that refers to 2012, which is very interesting. In 2012, Russia passed a law prohibiting Americans from adopting white Russian children and it's really interesting because I think it's an attempt to prevent these children from learning new ideas about anything else. Get to know Western life, for example, something that already happened in the 90s.

It wasn't until the Russians, who became very rich in the 90s, that they sent their children to the bad, bad West. There they have a completely different life, a different form of sexuality and, furthermore, here you knew freedom, that you had a completely different life, probably the problem existed, but this feeling describes it. in the most extreme form, which I think is very well formulated, this feeling that we have to stop the West from having Russian children, that we have to stop that, yes, and you wanted to, so to speak, feel at this moment, like a developing country, yes, children are being adopted from poor countries, yes, and the idea that the West is now taking children from Russia, we are putting them on the same level as African countries.

I imagine that the Russians pridenational is fierce contradicts exactly and this yes uh custom speaks of an identity panic says that it is about this breakup, so to speak, he said that communism did not matter to the Russians, they had a particularly sensual relationship with them, yes, that He loved that it was his country and that was this Russian. This Soviet empire is us, we are, exactly, and I had to think like that when I heard that about Dimitri Glukowski, who we both really like, who was now on our show again. and who once wrote this great text West and we where it says we knew that you live better we emulate you we learned the name of your brands by heart but for you westla and that was the feeling to this day we are second-class citizens yes Well, and that's the same problem.

There is a rapprochement between Wessis and Ossis, it cannot be great, of course, we largely had in the people of the West a strong sense of survival, exactly that. The Soviet people are, so to speak, wired in the same way and that is an appearance and also old Russian clichés. Karl Marx once said that Russians actually only use pigeons to drink and rape women, so there is a saying similar to Karl Marx. , yes, that was, so to speak, the classic image of the Russian that has always existed in the West, primitive people, yes, and among themselves they destroyed the Russians very, very strongly, yes exactly the Lukowski principle back then, somehow, when Gorbachev realized it. the fall of the wall we were so delighted that we thought that all the walls were now also collapsing all the others yes and that describes So I think it is so good that the Iron Curtain was raised and two worlds, the almost black and white socialist and the colorful capitalist one, they looked at each other in amazement.

We knew that you lived better but we had no idea how much better you lived and then you said wonder what happened to us suddenly, what happened that this enthusiasm turned into contempt, so to speak, and now hate and says we have a problem, we always have your technologies, we have your hamburgers, we have your way of life but the sentence Attention, this was always given to us in a package with values ​​with an ideology with a way of life, that is, the feeling is there, it always comes with an instruction manual on how would you like to be and live now maybe totally interesting is interesting I have Gorbachev's last book, which was published three and four years ago, I read it because I was absolutely curious to know how I would rate Putin, yes, and it doesn't matter at all, it's completely known that they don't like each other as people, that's exactly what we saw when Gorbachev died and so on.

So whoever gave half a reference to Putin because from the Russian point of view Gorbachev is the great traitor, the one who does the big thing so the Union in the West has revealed no, that is basically the one who does that to them relatively for Gorbachev, but interestingly, the criticisms that Putin has always expressed in the past are the best, the same also applies to our political security interests, simply you ruled it out, you know, NATO expansion and I don't think it's nonsense, etc. "The question is not whether from our point of view NATO eastward expansion for Russia is a real military danger.

We would deny that. The question is whether the Russians see it the same way, with a history that was invaded by Napoleon. which was invaded by the Germans in World War I and again in World War II. They see it differently and if you mean taking into account the interests of security policy, then that means at least understanding what It's what motivates the other side. Let's just say we didn't put much effort into it. Yes, you're right, you know this book by Tim Marshall on the power of geography that starts exactly with this, which is why I have to think about what you just said. say for kids chapter Russia because I Putin is a religious person according to everything you hear and I think sometimes he secretly prays that in Ukraine the mountains are finally growing, what I mean is that everyone always came for this northern plain from Europe through Ukraine and I simply attacked and invaded them, that's right and that is a border that is so long that it can hardly be defended conventionally and since we now have an idea of ​​the solar state in which the Russian army is, at less for a country that I see it as a major military power, the second strongest in the world, and now we see how fragile everything is, etc., then it can be understood somewhere that, in some way, they have always had this feeling of restlessness so that we are not misunderstood. here, the fact that Russian security interests have been seriously disrupted, that Russian sensitivities have not been taken into account, none of this justifies the crime of February 24, true, true, it explains everything to a certain extent, but the other story is that Putin has changed, yes, the former secret service man who feels a betrayal here, yes, the Soviet Union as a colonial empire, yes, that Ukrainians have never been granted a serious nation-state in no moment, only on paper, but not in this their ideology, that is fine and I think that really the best way to understand this conflict is that you do not say A or B yes, so not according to the motto that it was the evil West with its natural expansion or to say that nationality is completely crazy, crazy but to understand this process of mutual promotion.

I think that's an adequate explanation and when I see all the books that have been published recently that only tell one side of the story, I always think to myself why we don't tell the whole story. Yes, the February 24 war of aggression is still as big a crime as it was before because I understand how it came about. No excuses. That is. The correct point after what has been prepared. Yes, it still is. barbarity and just a small final observation because at the beginning we talked a lot about China. It's also incredibly stupid to fight these kinds of wars.

It's incredibly stupid when you're the leader of a country. Look at the Chinese and how much time has passed since they did the last war and all the countries in the world that don't, these are the countries, there are statistics about them too, these are the ones that are prospering, these are the countries that are growing, wars destroy countries, including those who start and fight war and win it by joining times: World War II has the macabre ending that after that Germany becomes an economic world, yes, and the victorious Great Britain lost its status as a world power.

The winner of the Second World War was Germany, even though they were, so to speak, the greatest crimes committed up to that time by humanity and even though it lost this war across the board, so it is winning wars and losing wars. that's an interesting chapter in itself, absolutely how many victories there are at the end, but kurhos is right, ne si after that greek general there. In an interesting parallel to today, there was a purus who was far superior militarily to the Romans, who mastered all of the Greek art of war, who wanted to follow the Romans at that time, who did not master it, that was an thing, starting from the top, he defeated the Romans again and again, but he always won again and won and at some point.

At that point he no longer had people and then, after winning without exception, he was able to say goodbye to southern Italy and return to Greece. He had lost, he had won to the death, that's why the famous man should have said something else. So Victoria, yes, and I lost exactly, Richard, that was exciting, thank you very much for this exchange and, um, yes, I think it will stay with us as a topic for a long time. He was very, very, very intensely grateful and inspired to talk to you. So the solution I can do it up to this point, I just give back and I just hope that we manage to include as many points of view as possible as interesting and if we manage to not think about any of the categories when we try to figure out what it is.

It is currently being performed in the world theater, so we are on the right side. With that in mind, thank you, goodbye, a production of m hoch 2 and Pot Stars at OMR on behalf of ZDF.