“Defender 2020” is a “maneuvre of shame”

Germany has made its contribution to shattering the only protection of mankind against renewed destruction in that it deliberately undermined Germany’s commitment to the applicable rules of international law by conducting military operations contrary to the Charter of the United Nations ever since the war against Yugoslavia in 1999.
This is not a historical matter. Anyone listening attentively these days will notice the enormous increase in military air traffic, as well as the tanks rolling across Germany to the Russian front.
This policy has been pursued towards Russia since the end of the Cold War in 1992, against all international agreements on the occasion of German reunification and also against commitments made to the then still existing Soviet Union in November 1990, in the so-called Charter of Paris. The spirit of good neighbourliness was then to determine life in Europe. But where are the Federal Government’s prohibitions in order to prevent the US Army deployment against Russia, which latter is commemorating the huge sacrifices it made in the Second World War, right now and during this NATO manoeuvre? Where was or is a German Federal President who, even if it were only once during his term of office, reminded us of the importance of the United Nations Charter on War Prevention, and who tied the hands of a compliant Federal Government when, once again, German troops had to go to war without a UN mandate?
The German Chancellor, Dr Angela Merkel, is breaking a taboo by allowing German soldiers to participate in the biggest NATO manoeuvre since the end of the Cold War against Russia. This taboo is likely to prevent the creation of lasting peace and possible reconciliation with the Russian Federation and the Russian people, although this is exactly what had before been made possible by grand gestures and rational action. It is precisely the Russian people who are meeting the German people with a benevolent open-mindedness that might actually seem to be completely unimaginable after the devastation of the Second World War and the attack of the German Reich against the Soviet Union. No, you may visit the streets and squares of this great country wherever you want: as a German, you are welcome. When I visited the famous Taman Division near Moscow in 1987 as the first Western defence politician, even the Division Museum was free of any disparagement of the opposing Wehrmacht’s soldiers. The division’s political colonel told me, using the words his mother had said to him, that there would be other mothers, mourning these young German soldiers.
In 1985, German President Richard von Weizäcker in the German Bundestag denounced a behaviour that might be called “repression of history”. This word is applicable to the behaviour of the entire German state leadership today, which voted in favour of letting this manoeuvre be carried out with German soldiers, which set the objectives and which allows the Bundeswehr generals to talk about the manoeuvre in the way they do. These leaders do not object to the fact that German soldiers are buried “in the front gardens of Leningrad/St. Petersburg”. Today, St. Petersburg is a shining pearl of common European culture. On 28 January 2020, a memorial event commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz was held in Jerusalem. On this occasion, Russian President Putin unveiled the Leningrad memorial commemorating the blockade of Leningrad by the German Reich during World War II. The German Chancellor was present, who is responsible for the fact that Russia today threatens to become, and has in fact already become, the target of the same “Versailles” spirit that struck her own country with the First World War and Versailles.