I would like to understand why Germany loves Russia so much, despite what's happened over the past year.

There was all kinds of funny business with Nordstream, Manuela Schleswig's fishy "foundation", and more. I can understand Schroeder - he's just getting paid by Putin every year. But Scholz? It seems that every month he makes up a different reason why Germany can't properly support Ukraine. A few helmets and kevlar vests and a handful of Gepards without ammunition, but Leopard 2s? God no, we couldn't possibly do that, it might hurt Putin's feelings! It seems he wants to give Ukraine just enough to watch them slowly bleed out.

Is it just that Putin is paying off most of the German politicians, and has been doing so for years? I guess they're pretty cheap to buy, and they're completely shameless about it - just look at Schroeder.

IMHO, Ukrainians should grab Königsberg for themselves after the end of war and then exchange it for something useful, e.g. exchange it for Transnistria with Moldova, instead of returning Königsberg to Germany.

Yeah, let's ruin our diplomatic relationships with Germany and Moldova, then try to join EU and NATO.

Why we need to try exchange Transnistria for Konigsberg in the first place?

Russian 14th army may strike from the back to support the main army, so they should be made toothless before the second wave of invasion, but Ukraine cannot attack 14th army without breaking relationships with Moldova, EU, UN, and NATO. However, Ukraine can exchange this problem (Transnistria) for another problem (Königsberg) to negate them both.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_presence_in_T...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobasna_ammunition_depot

But Koningsberg is czech!

Königsberg was part of Germany when annexed by Soviet Union. I see no page about Königsberg in Czech language at Wikipedia at all. Anyway, Germans were expelled, so Königsberg is populated by Russians now, which makes it similar to Transnistria, Crimea, etc.

Last October, a petition for the Czech republic to annex the region received over 20k signatures. This led to many jokes: https://www.petice.com/petice_za_vyhlaeni_referenda_o_pipoje...

The best thing Europe could do to Kaliningrad is encourage a separatist movement there. There's not much Russia could do about it if they had a consensus to separate, and being an exclave of a pariah country in the middle of foreign hostile territory is not exactly conductive to day-to-day living. If there was a clear (if unspoken) understanding that such an entity, once it clearly breaks up with Russia, would be admitted to EU under the usual rules, I think it could be sold.

And then? You have a piece of territory that is ethnically and culturally Russian, but integrated into Europe instead of that whole "Russian World" nonsense. That can be used as an agitprop showcase to contrast with Russia proper, especially as things get worse there as economy starts feeling more long-term effects from sanctions.

It's organic political opinion. For one thing, Germans feel very real guilt for their invasion of Russia in WW2, and they don't like the idea of aiding in a war against it. For another, the experience of the Cold War was much more traumatic for them than it was for the US, and they're not eager to start a new one.

This is absolutely true in my experience (live in Germany; have lots of friends and extended family here), and also mind-boggling. Germans also tend to be dismissive of Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltics, and sometimes even express disdain for at least one of those countries. Except that Germany didn't invade Russia in WW2; Germany invaded the USSR and Ukraine suffered at least as much in WW2 as Russia did. Some would argue more. It was the German-Soviet Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact¹ that allowed the Soviet occupation of the Baltics and Poland.

Yes, Germany really did the Soviets dirty² in the end, but German behavior was overall, in the opinion of many, worse for all the countries that the Germans allowed the Soviets to conquer than for the Russians directly. And yet, Germans truly seem to feel remorse only for Russians and not all FSU people. I don't exactly know why that is. My gut feeling is that Germans have more deeply ingrained respect, historically speaking, for the Russians than for Balts/Poles/Ukr/etc, so the feelings in general are deeper. Like I said at the beginning, Germans I know are really dismissive or worse of Poles/Balts/etc, though maybe not so much Ukrainians now, given current events.

Edit to add: I don't believe Germans "love russia so much", as suggested in the grandparent comment. Respect, yes, but not love, though I understand that is probably not meant literally anyway.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...

² English idiom

> I don't exactly know why that is. My gut feeling is that Germans have more deeply ingrained respect, historically speaking, for the Russians than for Balts/Poles/Ukr/etc, so the feelings in general are deeper.

Read this (amazing) dispatch from Berlin. Old school journalism with an attempt at analyzing the German psyche and (bonus) surprising information about the affinity felt for Russia by some Germans, including the Kaiser.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/germany/1940-04-01/p...

https://archive.is/lZMnx

-- snippet --

Hegel is one of the most abstruse of philosophers. He is quoted as saying, "One man has understood me and he has not." It is pretentious for someone not a philosophical scholar to discuss him. But what is important is the residue of his philosophy in the minds of the intelligentsia, who have passed it on in a sloganized form to the masses. The idea of the Volkstaat is certainly to be found in Hegel. He conceived the individual as finding himself only in the society of which he is an organic member; religion was not universal, but the spontaneous development of the national conscience; the artist was not an individual but a concentration of the passion and the power of the whole community. The deformation of these ideas is part of Naziism. The organic state is the Nazi ideal, in spite of the fact that Naziism destroyed what is organic. For one cannot create an organism by Gleichschaltung—switching into line—an idea not derived from biology but from mechanics.

Reading Hegel, and observing the relationship in Nazi Germany between state and Movement, one can see how easy would be a jump to the conception of the state as a proselytizing church, an idea which possessed Byzantium and the Eastern Church, and which is given expression in Dostoevski's novels. In "The Brothers Karamazov" he makes Father Paissy say: "The Church is not to be transformed into the State. That is Rome and its dream. On the contrary, the State transformed in the Church will ascend and become a church over the whole world—the glorious destiny ordained. . . . This star will rise in the East."

I quote Dostoevski here because the sympathy between the German idealistic philosophers and the great nineteenth century Russian novelists is constantly apparent. The Russian Communist state is certainly not the state dreamed of by Dostoevski who, at the end of his life at least, was deeply Christian; but it is a state that is, at the same time, a secular religion with a mission of world salvation. And so is the Nazi state. And with this it stops being a state in any Western sense of the word.

The attraction between Germany and Russia is enormous, and always has been. The Russian revolution was made in Germany—it grew out of German idealism via Marx—and Russia has contributed to it, and to the German mind as well, the spirit of Byzantium. That these two revolutions, the German and the Russian, would one day merge has been anticipated by many people. It is interesting that in 1931, two years before Hitler, the German Kaiser gave an interview at Doorn in which he expressed his scorn for any pan-Europeanism that would link Germany in an economic and spiritual alliance with Western Europe, above all with France and England. In fact, he made the statement, startling from a conservative at that time, that Germany's next of kin was Russia. "Western culture has reduced itself to mere utilitarianism, but the pendulum of civilization is switching to Eastern Europe and its way of life. We are not Westerners. . . . We cling with all our roots to the East."

The German belief that the West is decadent reached its clearest expression in Spengler. Utilitarianism is interpreted as a sure sign of decadence. Except in the East—to which Germany belongs—idealism is dead. The West has lost its biological vitality, its will to life and power. So run the arguments. The Nazis' revolt towards paganism as a spring from which Life can be renewed, and their systematic anti-intellectualism, are both reflections from Nietzsche, who denounced the concepts of "the good, the true, and the beautiful" as arresters of Life. Good, true, and beautiful, are only relative. They are the values of impotent, humble, feeble men with slave minds. The morality of bold, vigorous, healthy men is different. Their ethic is an ethic of strength, cruelty, combativeness, vigor and joy. Caution, humility, cleverness, pacifism, are only virtues for slaves, who can best advance themselves by the cultivation of these qualities. - Dorothy Thompson

(I posted this a few months ago expecting an interesting thread of discussion but it fell through the cracks.)

Do the Germans not understand that they also invaded and destroyed Ukraine in WW2?

They do. They also understand that there collaborators were Ukrainian nationalists (who were extremely anti-semitic and enthusiastically participated in pogroms) who are increasingly venerated in Ukraine. As an American, I'm able to compartmentalize this, and rationalize that Ukrainians are venerating people like Bandera for their anti-Russian partisanship, not for their anti-Jewish politics. But this is less of an option for Germans, who for very understandable reasons have a greater sensitivity to anti-Semitism than most nations.

The Anti-Semitism stuff is just a propaganda line invented by Vladislav Surkov (Russia’s Goebbels).

Like all good propaganda, it contains a kernel of truth that’s expanded and dilated until it becomes nonsense.

Believing in generalised Anti-Semitism and Nazism in Ukrainian society is like believing Saddam Hussein funded 9/11. It’s just a mind trick.

I think everything I wrote is accurate. Bandera was a vicious anti-Semite. Bandera did collaborate with the Nazis. Bandera is venerated in Ukraine (since 2014 and especially since 2022). Maidan was made possible by armed support from neo-nazi political parties. Based on my reading, I do not think that Ukraine is a particularly anti-Semitic place, and I think that they like Bandera mainly because they see him as an anti-Russian fighter. But it's easy for me to understand why Germans are much more uncomfortable with the symbolism that I am.

Oh I wasn't saying Bandera wasn't an Anti-semite, I have no idea. Just the idea that Ukraine is an anti-semite society, that's completely nuts. I've visited and have Ukrainian friends - they do have a big problem with racism, but not to some crazy level vs in that region. I've heard of things happening in Poland that well, are not very progressive - ie public buses not stopping for black people, racial beatings, taunting on the streets.

Ukraine just had a bigger issue I believe because of the participation of certain groups (Azov) in the Maidan revolution and then in the 2014+ war. My impression is this happened quite simply because every sector of society was at Maidan, but the Azov guys were more willing to get their hands dirty/get violent, thus they became prominent. That's my impression.

It's even more complicated that that. For example, whatever Bandera's personal ideology was, and despite his early attempts to collaborate with the Germans after they first occupied Ukraine, they quickly found the views and the goals that he was advocating dangerous enough to themselves to stick him into a concentration camp for the rest of the war.

Aiding a war ‘against it’?? These people are just dumb about this conflict. How about we all leave the borders as they are and do something more valuable for mankind. The only people who want war are the ones blinded by power

> A few helmets and kevlar vests and a handful of Gepards without ammunition, but Leopard 2s?

German military support is in the same order of magnitude as other countries. Including heavy weapons. Don't bother linking news articles or opinion pieces. Here's an up-to-date primary source: https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/data-sets/ukraine-suppo...

It's totally fair to argue that Germany should deliver more stuff or heavier weapons, but the helmets and vests and corruption rhetoric is unwarranted.

I agree with you, but part of the perception of Germany, including in GP comment, comes from Germany's hesitation to be as vocally supportive of Ukr, and from Germany's hesitation to take the risk on leading the way on supplying MBTs and other heavy weapons. For my entire life, Germany has acted like the leader of Europe, and now they have not either in words or deeds, which has colored the perception of ... not a few people. Germany has provided lots of aid, but they have been so damned shy about it, and never or at least rarely before other nations.

Given that Schroeder started working for Nord Stream within weeks of stepping down as Chancellor, later became manager of Nord Stream 2, was paid $350,000 per year as director of the board of Rosneft, and was nominated to the board of directors of Gazprom, is it really unwarranted to point out that he was bought and paid for as Putin's servant?

It's hard to argue with that, but I don't think you can generalise it to all German politicians or even the current government on the whole.