According to the former chairman of the Munich Security Conference, Wolfgang Ischinger, Germany must completely reorganize its foreign and security policy as a result of the Ukraine war. “No other country that I know of has been shaken by this unprovoked military attack in the essential basic assumptions of its foreign and security policy like Germany,” said Ischinger on Thursday at a conference in Salzburg.
“In security policy, in our Russia policy, in our energy policy, we are at “ground zero” and have to start from scratch,” he said at the “Salzburg Summit”, which was organized by the Austrian Federation of Industrialists. “Ground Zero” also stands for the World Trade Center in New York during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
For a long time, Germany was focused on preserving the current situation and therefore stuck to its partnership strategy with Moscow after the Russian annexation of the Ukrainian Crimea in 2014, said the former German ambassador in Washington.
Because of the long time it takes to manufacture weapons, Germany should, in Ischinger’s opinion, provide the Ukraine with additional equipment from Bundeswehr stocks in the short term. Germany should now deliver what it can, “in the full knowledge that this may also be weakening the combat capability of the Bundeswehr at the moment because it is reducing the Bundeswehr’s stocks,” he told the German Press Agency.
With the step, Germany would recognize “that at the moment Germany’s security in Ukraine is being defended by Ukraine.”
“From my point of view, there is every indication that the western partners, including Germany, will not splurge, but rather splurge and will provide Ukraine with as much support as possible now and not in the next year,” Ischinger continued.
The German government has approved the sale of 100 new self-propelled howitzers to Ukraine, manufacturer Krauss-Maffei Wegmann confirmed on Wednesday. Production is likely to take several years. Germany has so far delivered ten of the artillery pieces from its own stocks to Ukraine.