Jens Plötner has accused the German government of large sections of the media and the opposition of being reluctant to support Ukraine and, much later, of supplying it with heavy weapons from the United States, the United Kingdom and France. Speaking at a debate in the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), he said the debate on Ukraine 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 that Kyiv has requested from Germany]”But there are fewer articles on how our relationship with Russia will be in the future.” “And this is at least as exciting and relevant an issue that we could discuss,” he added. The comments provoked an angry response from Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, a leading Liberal Democrat MP from one of the three parties in Scholz’s governing coalition. Strack-Zimmermann, chairman of the Bundestag’s defense committee, said Plötner’s comments “reveal the way of thinking of the last decades that have brought us to this terrible situation”. “This is not the time to think lovingly about Russia but to help Ukraine,” he said. The remarks by Plötner, who rarely speaks in public, shed little light on the way Scholz and his team view the war in Ukraine. Soltz was attacked by allies in Eastern Europe for maintaining telephone contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite the atrocities allegedly committed by Russian troops in cities such as Butcha and the destruction of Russian warplanes and artillery. At the DGAP event, Plötner insisted that Germany supported Ukraine “politically, economically and militarily” “to a great extent”. He was speaking just hours before Ukraine announced it had received a number of PzH 2000 armor shells – the first heavy weapons Germany supplied to Kyiv in the conflict. The PzH is the Bundeswehr state-of-the-art artillery piece and can hit targets 40 kilometers away. But Plötner also spoke about Ukraine’s possible EU membership, which will be discussed at an EU summit later this week, on terms the government in Kyiv may find unpleasant.

“Being attacked does not automatically mean that your rule of law is improving,” he said. “The problems that Ukrainians are suffering from are structural, they still exist and they need to be addressed.” Noah Barkin, a think tank expert at the German Marshall Fund, said: “The messages sent by Plotner are worrying to the people of Ukraine, Germany’s partners in Eastern Europe and many of its closest allies throughout the world. people. including the United States “. He said the comments raised questions about whether Soltz’s team was “learning the right lessons from Putin’s war”. “Can the people who have forged close ties with Moscow and Beijing for years turn to a foreign policy vision that meets the challenges of this new era of systemic competition?” asked. Georg Löfflmann, an assistant professor of war studies at the University of Warwick, said Plötner symbolized the “established Ostpolitik mentality, economic commitment and military caution that have shaped German foreign policy for decades”.