Mention the war: Germany awakes

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist in New York. I'm your host John Fassman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the shaping your world. The Mongol Golden Horde, the Crimean Tatar Khanate, the Kingdom of Poland, Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Soviet Union all ruled what today is Ukraine, giving the country a rich cultural heritage, one that Russia's invasion is destroying. And hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who two months ago led ordinary peaceful lives have taken up arms to defend their country. Our obituary's editor remembers one an actor and television presenter dead at just 33. First up though, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivered an excoriating speech to Germany's lawmakers yester. When we told you that Nord Stream was a weapon and a preparation for a great war, we heard in response that it was a question of business, business, business, he said. But it was cement for a new wall. President Zelenskyy asked Chancellor Schulz to tear down the wall, echoing the words President Reagan had delivered in Berlin in 1987 when he appealed to the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to end the Cold War.

Mr. Gorbachev Tear down this wall.

The Ukrainian leader accused German lawmakers of failing to live up to their historical responsibility to secure peace in Europe. Instead, he argued, Germany has repeatedly appeased Russia. The new Chancellor of Europe's largest economy would argue that in recent weeks he has shown such responsibility. Major spending plans and an effective rearmament of the Bundeswehr. The German military offer to radically change Germany's defense posture. For decades Germany has been risk averse, but now it is entering a new age of confrontation. That pivot won't be easy.

It was a stinging speech, really.

Tom Nuttall is the Economist's Berlin bureau chief.

One of the things that was so telling about the speech is that the government yesterday had decided that they were not going to discuss it or debate it after it was over. So instead we had this completely bizarre spectacle where once the address had finished, they resumed the normal agenda, beginning with congratulating the MPs whose birthday it was, and then going on to debate vaccination. And for me, as well as being slightly surreal, this was a strong indication of some of the hurdles that this attempt to reinvent German foreign policy is going to face, because MPs are not always very comfortable in discussing these issues in parliament.

And so talk us through that reinvention and explain what is this pivot and how significant is it for Germany.

Right. So on February 27, three days after the war began, Olaf Scholz, the Chancellor, called a special session of the Bundestag on a Sunday. And in that speech, which lasted just under half an hour, a series of policies were announced, each one of which would have been very difficult to imagine Germany doing before the war began. So we had, for example, a commitment to meet the NATO goal of spending 2% of GDP on defence, something America and Allies have urged Germany to do for years. An announcement of the establishment of a 100 billion fund for investments in the severely under equipped Bundeswehr. An agreement to build two liquefied natural gas terminals on the North Sea coast to help Germany wean itself off the Russian gas which it's so dependent on. And all of this came on top of a series of announcements earlier in the week that in many cases were at least as head spinning. Olaf Scholz killed Nord Stream 2, this extremely controversial undersea pipeline that Allies had said was going to entrench German dependence on Russian energy. They agreed to send weapons to Ukraine, something that only days earlier they had said was impossible to do because of their own history. So the list goes on and on and on. The big question now will be what happens Next.

Of those pronouncements, which do you think are the most important?

Well, I think probably the Showstopper was the 100 billion fund. It's going to be embedded in the German constitution because otherwise it would violate Germany's fiscal rules. Now, all sorts of question marks over this thing. How quickly is it going to be spent? What is the money going to go on? How expansive is the notion of security that will be used to define where the money goes? Some Greens, some Social Democrats, would like the 100 billion fund to be used on what they consider to be a much more expansive idea of security. So not just buying stuff for the army and for the Air force and the navy, but investing in things like climate security or what they might call human security, which is basically a byword for development aid. This stuff is going to be debated in budget negotiations that will kick off in the Bundestag next week for a couple of months. It's not clear exactly where we're going to end up on that. But I think that we are about to see an interesting debate in Germany conducted through democratic representatives in the Bundestag, of just how willing the country is to accept that force, that the military, that the Bundeswehr is one legitimate tool of statecraft. And I think that's an open question whether Germany's ready to accept that yet.

And that also leads to a broader and I think very interesting question, right, which is these votes, this shift, this spending has come as a response to a crisis. I wonder what we're talking about here though, is really a broader philosophical shift if this is going to be a long term strategic change for the country. Is this a debate that Germans are ready to engage in? And if so, what does that debate look like and how do you think it ends?

I think that's basically the crucial question, John. So for years, if you talk to security wonks, they've been lamenting what they call the absence of a strategic culture in Germany, no systematic way of thinking through what are the country's interests, what are its priorities, how does it want to work with allies to further its interests? These sorts of questions. It's quite difficult to give them a proper airing in Germany. And often the country gets caught in these very, very stale debates over sort militarism versus peace, or is it legitimate for a country like Germany to be investing money in its Bundeswehr? Or does that mean that you're a sort of quasi warmonger? Debates that you don't really find in other countries of Germany's importance. But I think what people will be looking for will be for Germany to start thinking about these questions in a much more serious and systematic way than it has done in the past.

Now, how does this new strategic thinking apply to energy policy? In his speech yesterday, President Zelensky was very critical of Germany's energy policy. How feasible do you think it is that Germany can wean itself off of Russian energy imports? And what kind of timescale are we looking at?

It's really hard. So I think Germany has acknowledged very belatedly, many would say, that it has maneuvered itself into a position where it is highly dependent on Russian energy, and that puts it in a strategically vulnerable point. So what are they going to do? Well, the plans to accelerate renewable energy sources, which were already incredibly ambitious, they want 80% of German electricity to come from renewable sources. By 2030, they're going to be accelerated even further. And that's not only about money. It's about clearing away the bureaucratic thicket to make it easier to put up windmills and solar panels and so on, to restore some mothballed coal plants, at least in the short term. I don't think there's going to be any reversal on nuclear energy. The last three nuclear plants are going to close by the end of this year, as scheduled. But basically, this government, and the Green Party in particular, is going to have to start thinking about doing some things that it would have felt very uncomfortable about a few months ago, in order to ensure that security of supply is guaranteed and that Germany is able permanently to wean itself off these Russian energy supplies on which its industry, on which its houses, on which its electricity generators have been so dependent for years.

And so what do you think this era looks like in 20 or 30 years? What kind of Germany will we see? Is it a more militaristic country? Is it a country more comfortable with being a global power?

I think the first question is, how will Germany understand its role within Europe, and in particular, what will this do to relationship with France? The French, particularly under Emmanuel Macron, who is going through his own renegotiation bid at the moment, have sought to put Europe on a more secure and more independent footing. Strategic autonomy is Emmanuel Macron's buzz word. This is partly as a hedge against the unreliability of the United States. It's partly because Europe can find itself quite lonely in a world increasingly dominated by other great powers, the U.S. china, and now, of course, what's happened with this war in Ukraine has given a huge boost to these sorts of arguments. Now, whether Germany is really ready to step up, particularly on the security side, and say, yes, we are ready to invest more in an independent European capabilities? I'm sorry to say I think it does remain an open question. It's far too early to say tell if that was going to happen, then this is the moment at which it's going to happen. We've got the money behind it. We have the argument to make. We have a Chancellor who seems to be personally very politically invested in this idea. So there may be room for Germany to affect a real change in the way in which it understands its role in the world, the leadership role it can play inside Europe. But it's going to depend on all of these things. Can Schulz implement his ideas properly? Can they come up with that strategic philosophy that we were talking about before? Is the Chancellor and his ministers, Are they ready to really lead the kind of debate that has been wholly absent in German politics in recent years? If the answers to all of those questions are yes, then I think it is possible that in the timeframe that you're talking about, in the long term, we might see a very, very different sort of Germany from the one that we've become very familiar with in recent years.

All right, Tom, this was a real pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks a lot.

Foreign.

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Ukraine's resistance to Russia's invasion has been brave and unexpectedly fierce. As Russia finds itself stymied on the battlefield, it has laid waste to non military targets that has resulted in large numbers of civilian deaths. But it has also damaged Ukraine's artistic, cultural and architectural heritage.

Ukraine has an incredibly long and rich history and all the architecture art that you'd expect to go along with that.

Anna Reid writes about Eastern Europe for the Economist.

And it's a real treasure house of marvelous places and marvelous buildings and marvelous things. And, you know, this spans the whole spectrum of time, from early medieval fortresses right up to Soviet architecture. A lot has been damaged already and there are dreadful fears for what might be to come.

The war has been going on for three weeks now. How much damage has there been?

Well, the city worst hit is Kharkiv, which is near the eastern border with Russia. It's got this fabulous legacy of late 1800s, early 1900s Art Nouveau buildings. It's lots of different influences, very fantastical, very fun, often decorated with elaborate stucco work and so on. That's the old center of Kharkiv. And it started being bombarded, being hit with missiles right from the first day of the war. And according to an architectural historian, from there now fled. I talked to, you know, almost every building in both the old centre and the new centres has now taken damage of some sort. And she was saying, you know, with break in her voice, you know, what's going to become of our Kharkiv?

And I imagine this is also true for Kharkiv's museums.

Yes, that's true. Kharkiv has a big fine arts museum with a big collection of Russian artists, Ukrainian artists and also some West European old masters. And it lost all its windows early on in one of the blasts and staff have been posting pictures on social media and you can see the curtains in tatters and glass all over the parquet floors and some of the pictures still on the walls, even others have been taken down, at least put sort of face down on the floor. But when the war began, obviously they had not completed the job of packing everything up and taking it to safety.

So I assume this is not just happening in Kharkiv. Right. There are a number of cities, any number of cities under bombardment. It must be devastating to people whose lives have been dedicated to Ukrainian culture.

It is absolutely devastating. I mean, I interviewed a whole bunch of art historians and curators and architectural historians, and every one of them, you know, you could hear the desperation in their voice. They're terrified for their collections and their buildings. They know a lot of stuff hasn't been taken to safety yet. You can hear the sort of fear and anger, anxiety, acute anxiety in their voices. And I was just on a zoom seminar, actually, with a woman from Kharkiv, and she burst into tears in the middle of it. She put up a photograph of the interior of the Conservatoire there, which is a handsome 19th century neoclassical building. And it was full of people and four grand pianos. And she said, you know, everything you see here, that whole interior and those pianos all gone now. And then she said, but the people are still there and we shall rebuild. And that's very much the mood.

And Anna, now I imagine that curators outside Kharkiv are doing everything they can, right, to get whatever artworks can be moved to safety.

Yes, but the beginning of the war caught cultural institutions napping, really. You know, if you remember, in the run up to the war, President Zelenskyy had been going on national television saying, carry on as normal, carry on life as usual, let's not panic. So most institutions stayed open right up to the actual attack. I was in Kyiv just under a fortnight before the war began, and I visited a couple of galleries operating completely as normal, full of happy crowds, enjoying the pictures. So artworks are either being put away in basements and curators are understandably tight lipped about where exactly they've been put for fear of targeting and of looting. And other artworks, the highlights are being moved to Lviv in the west, and there are problems with that because Lviv itself is overwhelmed with looking after its own collections. And even worse, Lviv itself may come into the firing line. And we're all slightly holding our breath to see how long Lviv itself, which is an absolutely gorgeous, gorgeous little city, thinks. Crack off, Think Salzburg, how long Lviv remains safe.

And with Russian troops still advancing, I imagine there's just a tremendous amount still at risk.

Well, next in line for bombardment probably is Kiev itself, which is a splendid, splendid ancient city. Most of what you see walking around the historic center is gorgeous, very, very grand, elaborate stucco buildings with lots of very elaborate mouldings. And it was the capital of Kievan Rus, which is this sort of early, early polity, which Putin really stresses in his pseudo historical essays about Ukraine. He says that because Kyiv was the capital of Kyivan Rus, Ukrainians are really Russians. And there is some hope, I fear, faint hope, that because Kiev has this sort of sacred place in the Russian consciousness as well as the Ukrainian ones, that he might spare Kiev. He might deliberately not shell the historic center of Kyiv. However you look at the way he treats, and I think that's possibly wishful thinking so far, however, the centre is undamaged and we have to wait and see how long that lasts.

And we haven't even mentioned records, libraries, archives, what's at risk there?

Well, the archives are extremely important, particularly because Russia over the last 15 years or so has been gradually closing its most sensitive archives to foreign scholars. Very hard to get into them now. And so what's happened over the last several years is that scholarship into the Soviet period in general, not just into Ukraine's own history, has moved to Kyiv. It's become a center of research for academics and writers everywhere. And, well, for the time being, those archives are not accessible. That's a real blow. The other great fear, of course, of archivists and historians, Ukrainian historians, is that any Russian occupiers will purge the archives or destroy all the material which doesn't go to Putin's. Ukraine is really Russia narrative. And I was talking to a historian about it the other day, and she was saying, he doesn't just want to destroy buildings. He doesn't just want to destroy the state. He doesn't just want to destroy people and families. He actually wants to destroy Ukrainian ness. And that is the fear that Putin is driven by this sort of loathing of Ukrainian ness itself. And so he'll go for the culture, because it's the culture which carries a nation even through long periods when it doesn't have a state.

Let's hope he doesn't do that. Anna, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you very much indeed.

On the very day that Russia invaded Ukraine, Pasha Lee went down to the Territorial Defense Forces office to sign up.

Ann Ro is the Economist's obituaries editor.

And at the office, it's very probable that the other people recognized him because his face was famous, because he was an actor and a television presenter. The job he'd walked away from was as a presenter on a television channel called dom, which means home in Ukrainian. But to be at DOM at all was a little bit of a political statement, because Dom had been set up in 2020 as a channel to broadcast particularly to the eastern parts of Ukraine, which had been occupied by Russia. The whole purpose was to make sure that these people who had been cut off from general Ukrainian communications and TV programming could know what the truth was. And DOM sold itself heavily on telling the truth. They also broadcasted Crimea, and as it happened, Pashali was from Crimea himself. He'd been born in Yevpatoriya, which. Which was a rather beautiful resort and health center on the Black Sea coast. But later on, and certainly after the Russian annexation of Ukraine in 2014, it was no longer really a healthy place to live. And at some point he moved to Irpin, just northwest of Kyiv. That was a town that was pretty attractive to him, not least because it had a film festival and it had a beautiful theater called the Colezo, where He could indulge his passion for acting, so he was often there on a very tiny stage. At the same time he was pursuing a film career which he'd started when he was only 15. He specialized really in horror thrillers or horror comedy. There were usually demons in his films or rather stupid students trapped in places where they shouldn't have gone in the first place, like down pits or in forests in the Carpathians. He made quite a name for himself as a suave character in these films. One of his most recent ones was called Selfie Party, and in that he played a policeman who tried to break up a drunken orgy among students and solve a mystery of a dead body found lying on the lawn. He also dubbed other films for Ukrainian versions. He played Bilbo Baggins, Yalbro Bonne begins. Bilbo Baggins is a chap who is rather timid at first and gradually grows in courage and eventually defeats the dreadful dragon Smaug that has laid waste the land with fire. Bilbo Baggins keeps up his spirits on his journey by thinking of green meadows and on Pajerly's Instagram page, which he was absolutely devoted to, his his profile picture was a yellow Ukrainian field. He had begun recently to do slightly more serious work. The film he was working on in 2021 was called Miani I Piece and it was set in the eastern parts of Ukraine, the occupied territories, and he was playing a soldier there. So there'd been brushes with military life in a way, but they were not at all going to be the same as volunteering in the Territorial Defense Forces. For a start, he hadn't really ever engaged with weapons, unless you counted the rather ridiculous weapons, like a baseball bat and a fake pistol which he'd wielded in the films. When he joined the Territorial Defence Forces, his days were spent packing up emergency bags, practicing first aid and drilling with weapons in the snow. Wooden rifles at first, and he learned how to evacuate buildings, how to rescue people, and all this he had to very quickly put into operation because within a few days of invading, Russia had begun to bombard Irpin and he was supposed to defend it. After about three days without water or food or power, the citizens of Irpin began to cram towards the the bridge that crossed the River Irpin towards Kyiv, because they thought the capital city would actually be a safer place. As they crowded towards it, Ukrainian forces blew it up because they wanted to slow the Russian advance. So all these citizens were stranded. On March 6, he found himself in the middle of trying to help these people over. It was undoubtedly the most dangerous moment that he'd been involved in. He'd been fairly buoyant before, and he had filled his Instagram with messages of let's all unite and let's all help each other and volunteer, and then told people that he was smiling because everything was going to work out, everything was going to go Ukraine's way. But when it came to it, things did not seem to be going Ukraine's way. He was having to race out into the danger to rescue these people and shepherd them to safety. And all the time there's bombing and shelling going on around him. No one knew quite what had happened to him for a few days. And then seven days after he was killed, his body was found. And it appeared then that he had actually given his bulletproof vest to the child that he was carrying. And this, of course, was a fairly elementary mistake for a military man to make. But he'd never meant to be a soldier in the first place.

That was Ann Ro on Pasha Lee, who was killed at the age of 33. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors this week are Marguerite Howell, Kim Gittleson and Chris Impey. And our sound engineer is Saul Rivers. Our senior producers are Stevie Hertz, Jack Gill, Sam Westren and John Jo Devlin. Our producers are William Warren, Rory Galloway, Alize Jean Baptiste. And our assistant producer is Abasoy Osundairo, with extra production help this week from Kevin Kaners and Emily Elias. We'll all see you back here on Monday.