For the past week, the Russian army has been firing rockets at civilian targets in Ukraine. In the ARD talk show "Anne Will" on Sunday evening, guests discuss how to stop Russia's President Putin. Negotiations with the Kremlin chief are not approved.
It is last Monday morning. Alarm sirens wail in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. Then the first Russian rockets hit the city. A Kremlin spokesman would later claim that military targets had been hit. A lie. In truth, residential areas are being shelled, bridges, children's playgrounds. There are dead and injured, all civilians. The attacks later expanded to other Ukrainian cities.
"The shelling of civilian targets is nothing new. It's almost daily," says Green Party politician Marina Weisband. She was born in Ukraine, her parents live there. Weisband speaks to her relatives every day. She reports on the defiance of the people and their love for freedom.
"The war is designed to cause terror, to kill the civilian population and to destroy Ukraine as a country," she says on the ARD talk show "Anne Will", in which the guests once again talk about the situation in Ukraine, but also about Vladimir Putin, who ordered the Russian army to invade the country in violation of international law. All the guests on the program know that Russia's attack so far has been a failure, and the question is how the Russian President could be stopped.
Weisband predicts that Putin will soon try to promote a ceasefire as soon as possible. "The best thing that can happen to him right now is freeze the conflict so he can calmly rearm and restart the invasion earlier this year. The best thing we can do about it is not to respond to that, but to shut down our guns use that Ukraine has to liberate the cities - and the population that is being terrorized."
Russia expert Sarah Pagung cannot entirely agree. Armistice talks would be a smart move if Putin wants a break, she admits. For the scientist, however, the signs are not pointing to negotiations at the moment, on the contrary: "Putin shows that no concessions will be made and that Russia is also ready for absolute brutality," she says, referring to the appointment of Sergei Surovikin as the new commander for the Russian Ukraine campaign. The army general and loyal Kremlin hardliner could already be responsible for last Monday's attacks. He is considered particularly brutal and unscrupulous, and he is an unconditional supporter of the Russian President.
Putin, a former KGB officer, is a loyal secret service agent, is how the chairman of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Martin Schulz, characterizes the Russian president. "Putin is capable of anything," he says. He was trained in deception and terror against individuals. The "strategy of deception, threats and division" also includes warnings against the use of nuclear weapons. The threat must be taken seriously, says Schulz, but: "In the end we have to expect the worst, but not that."
Marina Weisband doesn't really fear a nuclear threat either. Russia has other means, she explains. The destruction of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol is comparable to the use of five tactical atomic bombs. "Putin's strongest weapon is our fear," emphasizes Weisband. "What he would fear most is if we just didn't psychoanalyze him all the time and look: What does Putin think, what could he do. No, we have to say: Hey, you do this and that, then we'll send a few Leopard tanks. You do this and that, then we try even harder to defend the land that legally belongs to Ukraine. Oh, you wage a hybrid war and flood our social media with disinformation, then we develop more strategies, we continue to develop our democracies, we stand stronger together with our democratic allies."
Aggressive wars shouldn't be rewarded, demands Weisband, who is dominating the Anne Will program this time. "My first, supreme and overriding goal is peace - in Ukraine, in Europe, in the world," she says. But there will be no peace as long as Russia occupies 20 percent of Ukraine. There can only be peace if the criminals of this war are brought to justice and if the world security order is valued. She rightly points out that Russia is the only UN member state that has never had to apply for membership.
Europe must now defend itself against the war in Ukraine and against Russia's hybrid warfare. The war must not be allowed to freeze, as many people in Germany were demanding. According to Weisband, that did not work out in 2014 after the occupation of Crimea, and the result was the illegal attack on Ukraine in 2022. In the event of a lull in the war, Putin would strengthen his troops, gather new resources and set up bases. "Putin announced that openly. And I think if there's anything we have to take seriously, it's what he says openly."
