Negotiations instead of arms deliveries was one of the demands at the demonstration initiated by Sahra Wagenknecht in Berlin over the weekend, the “uprising for peace”. But what does that look like in reality? What happens to Ukraine and the people there the moment an embargo comes into effect? How willing is Vladimir Putin to negotiate anyway and what could peace in Ukraine look like – as far as the initial situation of the discussion on the previous evening at Louis Klamroth and “Hard but fair”.
The show had been running for a while when the first clip offered another look at the past weekend, from Louis Klamroth’s point of view. He had gone to Berlin to keep his nose in the demo wind. He received an icy welcome, and not just because of the temperatures. “Lying press,” it was said, they wanted to “stylize Putin as Hitler,” and it was actually debatable, “whether it was an attack,” said some of the voices that countered the “hard but fair” moderator Demo in Berlin, also a magnet for neo-Nazis, citizens of the Reich and Holocaust deniers.
Back in the studio, Sahra Wagenknecht acknowledged it with a shrug of the shoulders, according to the old motto “shrinkage is everywhere”, but this also applies to demos: there are also a few rotten eggs among them, if you would call them that at all. One shouldn’t let such a demo be poisoned by a few AfD people.
“What has to happen for the war to end?” Klamroth’s predecessor, Plasberg, asked his guests in April last year. Shortly after the anniversary of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, and also exactly one year after the assassination of the Russian regime critic Boris Nemtsov, this is the sad realization: that although there are many dead, injured, raped, crippled and displaced, there is still an answer not necessarily closer.
For Sahra Wagenknecht, one of the problems is that Selenskyj and Germany are not working towards negotiations, or as Heribert Prantl from the Süddeutsche put it: Peace is still an egg that has not yet been laid, but you can prepare a nest for it.
Such metaphors may still be understandable when looking at the calendar, but there is probably less of a reality check, despite Easter ahead. Political scientist Herfried Münkler, the pointed, relaxed counterpoint in the group that tended to overheat, made that clear. According to the Budapest Agreement, the West is obliged to help defend Ukraine, so you can’t just ignore it. The learning effect otherwise with “revisionist actors” such as Erdogan: Yes, you can wage war in Europe again.
What Strack-Zimmermann, in view of the countless rapes in the Ukraine in particular, was appalled by Alice Schwarzer’s commitment to stopping the delivery of weapons, and Göring-Eckardt tried to make it clear in repeated summaries – the situation on the various fronts without alternative – was done by the man who had just returned from Bachmut and switched on Lieutenant Colonel Sergiy Osachuk made it clear: Putin wants to “wipe out and destroy everything”, Ukraine is fighting against him and for a free life with dignity. His thanks also go to the German leadership, who, after the start with 5000 helmets, switched to delivering something more solid. His appeal: “Stay with us”.
The short clip in which raped women reported on their terrible experiences was also shocking. Wagenknecht’s comment on this is, of course, horrible, but it’s just “part of the war”, it’s always like this and in general: “War crimes are committed by both sides”. Klamroth’s clear answer to this relativization is that there is no evidence of Ukrainian rapes.
As far as the negotiations are concerned, which were repeatedly demanded and rarely concretised, Herfried Münkler dug deep into the history box again, it was not exactly hopeful what he pulled out of it. At the end of the 30-year war, negotiations had been going on for about four years (!) and that while the war went on. The question of peace, as Münkler briefly exclaimed, went beyond composure, i.e. where Strack-Zimmermann called Alice Weidel as Wagenknecht’s “blonde colleague”, was “more complex than stepping on the foot”.
