Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that Russian President Vladimir Putin started the war with the intention of “occupying” Ukraine. Scholz said that NATO has never been a threat to Russia.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of launching the attack on Ukraine for “completely absurd” reasons. “NATO has never been a threat to Russia,” he said Sunday in Berlin during a public dialogue on the occasion of the federal government’s open day.
For years, Moscow has accused NATO of increasing its eastward expansion to the detriment of Russia’s interests. According to Scholz, in talks before the war started in February, he assured Putin that Ukraine would not join NATO “in the next 30 years”. However, Putin had “completely absurd” ideas, Scholzi said. The Russian president had told him, for example, that Belarus and Ukraine should not be independent states.
Olaf Scholzi is sure that Vladimir Putin planned this war long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24. “It is a war that Putin, Russia, started, clearly with the intention of conquering the neighboring country. I think that was the original intention,” Scholz said as he compared Russia’s actions in the early days of imperialism.
Russia is currently preoccupied with gaining territory in eastern Ukraine, but it is not certain that it will remain so, the chancellor said, and therefore surrender is not a sensible strategy. “Putin actually had the idea to slide a ballpoint pen over the European landscape and then say: ‘This is mine and this is yours,'” Scholz said, adding that Germany cannot accept this.
However, Scholz announced that he will not stop the dialogue with Putin.
In response to former Bundeswehr General Klaus Wittmann, who asked why Germany was not supplying Ukraine with armored personnel carriers, Scholzi listed other types of arms deliveries that have already taken place and are still planned.
“Germany is supplying a lot of weapons” and “at the same time it is supplying the most modern and efficient equipment”, emphasized Scholz. But it all has to do with “ensuring that there is no escalation of the war”.
Scholz referred to deliveries of Gepard anti-aircraft tanks, 2,000 armored howitzers and multiple missiles, planned deliveries of the Iris-T air defense system and the Cobra artillery radar. “They will arrive soon,” he assured. Germany will continue to give Ukraine “what it needs for its defense”, said the German chancellor.