CashNews.co
The timing couldn’t be worse. Just as Ukrainian forces are regaining the initiative and defying Moscow by launching a daring assault on their aggressor’s territory, Germany, Europe’s main supplier of aid to Ukraine, decided that it can no longer afford to maintain its military assistance to Kyiv at current levels, and will instead cut it in half.
The decision comes, more precisely, from Germany’s all-powerful Finance Minister Christian Lindner, representative of the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) within the government’s tripartite coalition. An intractable defender of budgetary rigor, the minister announced in a letter addressed to the Social Democratic defense minister and the Green foreign affairs minister on August 5 that they would have to look elsewhere than in his budget, from 2025 onwards, for the funds necessary to deliver the additional equipment promised to Ukraine. The contents of the letter were revealed on August 17 by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. Instead, Lindner pointed to financing from yet-unavailable European funds or interest on frozen Russian assets.
The announcement was met with dismay from Ukrainians and delight from Donald Trump’s supporters on the other side of the Atlantic, who were quick to ask why the United States should help Ukraine if Europe stops doing so. Berlin’s European partners have so far refrained from commenting on Lindner’s decision, out of concern not to further complicate Germany’s fragile political situation and in hopes, no doubt, that discussions within the government or the Bundestag will enable the measure to be amended.
For more than three years, Germany’s partners have been grappling with the difficulties of an unmanageable coalition in Berlin. They also know that Chancellor Olaf Scholz, increasingly weakened, faces three regional elections in September in the eastern Länder, where populist parties on the right and left, opposed to aid for Ukraine, are well placed.
All this is true, but the chancellor’s inability to resist the diktats of his finance minister sends a disastrous signal beyond Germany when it comes to aid for a country under Russian attack in the heart of Europe. The return of large-scale war to the European continent has turned the geopolitical situation on its head, forcing European states to increase their defense spending considerably. It would be fatal if Germany, the European Union’s leading economic power and second only to the US in providing aid to Ukraine, were to shy away from this effort on the pretext of domestic political imperatives.
This is the signal that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been waiting for since he launched the invasion of Kyiv two and a half years ago: the renunciation of Kyiv’s European allies, in the name of budgetary constraints and the wear and tear of public opinion. Aware more than anyone else of Germany’s vulnerabilities in this respect, Putin is working the disinformation machine to the hilt.
The timing is all the more unfortunate, given that France is heavily handicapped by its political crisis and the US is in the midst of an election campaign. Fortunately, one of Kyiv’s allies remains firm: the United Kingdom, whose new Labour government has maintained the Conservatives’ policy of aid to Ukraine.