In early May, the Russian ambassador to Germany organized a party in honor of the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II. Guests at the embassy, a Stalin-era behemoth that covers more German territory than the nearby parliament building, included a host of dignitaries. Communist East Germany’s last boss, Egon Krenz, now 86, mingled under the chandeliers with Gerhard Schröder, chancellor of a unified Germany from 1998 to 2005 (and, more recently, lobbyist for Russian energy companies). Tino Chrupalla, co-leader of Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party, wore a tie in the colors of the Russian Federation.
The event received some disdain in the German press, but little further attention. Sixteen months after Russia’s war against Ukraine, public opinion in Germany, as in all of Europe, overwhelmingly views Russia as an aggressor to be shunned and Ukraine as a defender deserving of help. The purveyors of Russian influence have now become smaller. Mr. Schröder, for example, chaired the board of the now-closed Nord Stream pipelines that hooked Germany on Russian gas. Last summer, Russia shut down the pipes, which were then blown up by mysterious saboteurs. The ex-chancellor has been expelled from clubs, barred from the functions of his Social Democratic Party (although he remains a party member) and stripped of government-provided office facilities. As for Mr. Chrupalla, the AfD leader’s coziness with Russia did not just irritate the German tabloids. Leaked messages show consternation among MPs from his own party.
But while Russia’s efforts to spread persuasion across Europe have not been entirely successful, they have not been entirely unsuccessful either. A subculture of what Germans dismiss as Putinversteher – sympathizers who “understand” Russian leader Vladimir Putin – thrives outside the mainstream. Across Europe, their whispers are a leitmotif in the rumbling of complaints about seemingly unrelated problems like inflation, crumbling public services, overbearing The grumblers have only just begun to question the extent of their governments’ largesse toward Ukraine, which in February This year, it generated more than 60 billion euros in economic and military aid from Brussels and the individual EU countries. (and 70 billion euros if Britain joins in, an amount roughly equal to America’s contribution.) If Ukraine’s fight goes on too long or goes wrong, there are plenty of people waiting to take the blame to take.
Europe’s “useful idiots,” a Cold War term for unwitting allies of communism, cover a broad spectrum. In politics, parties from both the far right and the far left disagree on many things; in Ukraine these extremes have often converged and demanded a moment. peace” that would in effect reward Russian aggression with land. In the media and academia, intellectuals still seem happy to ignore the evidence of Russia’s imperial intentions and its descent into criminality, and to deplore Europe’s entanglement in what they see as a proxy war between America and Russia, or perhaps, even grander speculation, between America and China. And in the business world, despite multiple rounds of Western sanctions, Russia still has many “friends.”
Putin’s enablers include several European governments. Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary since 2010, was the most obvious. The populist strongman has repeatedly criticized Western support for Ukraine and continued Hungary’s imports of Russian gas. His government also refuses to allow the transit of weapons given to Ukraine by Hungary’s fellow members of NATO and the EU. Neighboring Austria, in a quieter but equally profitable manner, has also largely avoided the fight, citing its non-membership in NATO and its self-proclaimed role as a bridge between East and West, offering little help to Ukraine even as its trade with Russia has increased.
Greece, another EU member, is in compliance with EU sanctions but has refrained from further tightening sanctions on Russian oil shipments, perhaps because Greek companies happen to make so much money from the trade. Only recently and under heavy American pressure, Cyprus, an offshore financial haven, closed some 4,000 local bank accounts of Russians. Facing less pressure, non-EU countries such as Turkey and Serbia do not even bother to disguise the lucrative backdoor service they provide to Russia.
Some countries have turned seemingly noble intentions into policies that warm Putin’s heart. Citing its vaunted neutrality, Switzerland has used arcane local laws to block the supply of weapons to Ukraine, including 96 mothballed Leopard tanks located in Italy that happen to be owned by a private Swiss company. Repeatedly scoring their own goals with the principles of freedom of expression, police in Sweden have allowed public burning of the Quran. This has deeply irked Muslim-majority Turkey, which is vetoing Sweden’s bid to join NATO. And Mr Putin has gleefully targeted the Swedes. During a trip to Dagestan before the Eid holiday in late June, he had himself filmed tenderly holding a Koran as he explained that it is a crime under Russian law to desecrate sacred things.
Yet even sturdy-looking stones in the so-called European retaining wall for Ukraine can crumble. Slovakia, for example, has been a vital conduit for Western aid, recently pledging its fleet of thirteen Soviet-era MiG-29 fighter jets to the Ukrainian air force. But polls show that the party of Robert Fico, a Russophile leftist who blames “Ukrainian fascists” for provoking Putin, is likely to win national elections scheduled for September.
France is a key player in both NATO and the EU. But a French parliamentary panel recently scolded Marine Le Pen, President Emmanuel Macron’s main challenger in last year’s elections, for parroting Russian propaganda after the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Ms Le Pen strongly denies that her defense of Mr Putin had something to do with it. with the nine million euros in loans her party received that year from Russian-controlled banks. She has condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but last October, seven months after the start of the war, she declared that sanctions against Russia were not working.
While Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is a strong supporter of Ukraine, Matteo Salvini, who leads the second largest party in her coalition, is another opponent of sanctions and, at least until the invasion, was a declared fan of Putin.
Germany, like France, seems to be a strong supporter. Yet the AfD, bluntly described by the head of the country’s internal intelligence service as a propagator of Russian narratives, has risen in the polls. The country now shares second place with the ruling Social Democrats. At the opposite political pole, Sahra Wagenknecht, a telegenetic leftist and peace-at-all-costs peacenik, says pollsters tell her she could win 19 to 30 percent of the German national vote. While public support for helping Ukraine remains strong, the trend is downward.
Useful idiotic stories are surprisingly resilient. Their main points – that NATO “provoked” Russia’s repeated attacks on and eventual invasion of Ukraine, that Ukraine is an artificial entity created on land that is rightfully Russia’s, and that America is adding fuel to this fire for weapons to sell and maintain its global hegemony – One is what Italians call benaltrismo or whatever: NATO attacked Serbia in 1999 and Libya in 2011, plus America invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, so what’s the problem if Russia misbehaves? Another variant is dieterismo, the idea that there is an ‘inside’ story behind events. Wolfgang Streeck, a German sociologist, writes in the New Left Review that the hidden purpose of the crisis is to pave the way for a fearful EU under the thumb of a pumped-up NATO.
What seems to connect Europe’s far-right, far-left and ‘intellectual’ opposition to Western policies, however, is somewhat simpler. It’s a gray, Cold War-style anti-Americanism. For example, the East German-born Mr Chrupalla insists that the Amis have taken advantage of the war in Ukraine by forcing Germany to switch from Russian natural gas through pipelines to more expensive liquid gas shipped from America. This is a trap, he points out, because imported American energy is so much more expensive that German manufacturers will have to shift production. Ms. Wagenknecht, his left-wing rival, believes America forced the war on Russia by trying to draw Ukraine into its “sphere of influence.”
At a recent political rally near Berlin, Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, was heckled by a chorus of staunch peacemakers chanting “War monger!” shouted. Normally polite, soft-spoken and unflappable, Scholz roared back into the microphone that it was Mr Putin who wanted to destroy and conquer Ukraine. “If you loudmouths had any brains, you’d recognize the real warmongers!”
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