“Cooperation … with Putin’s aggressive, imperialist Russia is inconceivable for the foreseeable future,” he told lawmakers. He spoke a few days after one of his closest advisers, Jens Plötner, made a splash, urging the media to focus more on Germany’s future relationship with Russia than on supplying Ukraine with heavy weapons. Scholz did not comment on Plötner’s comments, but downgraded the prospect of ever returning to the kind of relationship Germany had with Russia before President Vladimir Putin sent troops to Ukraine in February. However, NATO should not revoke the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act governing relations between Moscow and the Western military alliance, he said, adding that this would “play into the hands of Putin and his propaganda.” The chancellor said the founding act established principles – such as respect for borders, sovereignty of independent states and renunciation of violence – that Putin had violated. In a statement issued ahead of this week’s EU summit in Brussels, the G7 summit in Bavaria at the weekend and the NATO summit in Madrid next week, Scholz called for a new “Marshall Plan” for Ukraine to assist in its post-war reconstruction. Solz said the images he saw during his trip to Kyiv earlier this month reminded him of photographs of German cities destroyed during World War II. “And like war-torn Europe then, Ukraine now needs a Marshall Plan to rebuild it,” he said. Foreign Policy Adviser Plötner this week provoked an angry reaction from political critics as well as allies, saying the talk of Ukraine’s aid was driven by a “fever that misses the big issues”.

“You can fill many newspaper pages with 20 Marders [a kind of infantry fighting vehicle Kyiv has requested from Germany]”But there are fewer articles on what our relationship with Russia should be like in the future,” Plötner said during a debate at the German Foreign Relations Council (DGAP) on Monday. Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, a Liberal Democrat MP from one of the three parties in Scholz’s ruling coalition, said Plötner’s comments revealed “the way of thinking of the last few decades that has put us in this dire situation”. “It’s not time to think back to Russia, but to help Ukraine,” said Strack-Zimmermann, who also chairs the Bundestag’s defense committee.