Kyiv and Moscow sign an agreement to export grain from Ukraine.

The agreement is mediated by Turkey and the United Nations.

The next day, Russia fired rockets at the port of Odessa, which Moscow at first unabashedly denied, but then conceded.

When it comes to gas supplies, Russia behaves towards Germany and its partners in a way that shows absolutely no respect for contracts, and it is hardly accidental that it gives the impression that Russia wants to wear Germany and its partners down.

It is counterproductive to react to this with panic ("Help, popular uprising!") or scaremongering ("ordeal!").

Nefarious power politicians reward neither weakness nor signs of subservience.

You have to belong to a very special species of German intellectuals, with statements that occasionally oscillate between cluelessness and dishonesty, to seriously claim that in such an environment, negotiations with the man in the Kremlin can be conducted on the basis of mutual trust.

Crocheting together doesn't help

No Western country is feeling the pressure to change, stemming from long-term geopolitical and energy policy naivety, as dramatically as Germany.

This pressure manifests itself materially, because there is a loss of prosperity due to higher inflation rates and the energy supply has to be realigned not only in the long term, but in a hurry for the coming winter.

But the pressure to change does not spare people's minds either.

The generation of the Bonn Hofgarten and the Mutlanger blockades must recognize how much they remained for decades, sitting under the nuclear protective umbrella of the despised Americans, stuck to the illusion that peace could be achieved through Easter marches, crocheting together, edifying discussions in a circle of chairs and the dismantling of the Bundeswehr to guarantee a kind of technical aid organization.

At the same time, at least parts of the economy championed the idea of ​​the unconditional primacy of the economic, even when dealing with questionable rulers.

Now Russia is aggressively using energy and food as weapons in its foreign policy.

Germany did not go astray on its own with a former chancellor, but in a certainly not all-encompassing but far-reaching social consensus.

The consequences are manifold: Germany suddenly finds itself robbed of its role as teacher in Europe;

instead, it has to listen to criticism for its energy policy - combined with calls for structural reforms.

From the beginning of the war there was a tendency in Germany to overestimate the economic power of Russia.

This began with the prophecy that sanctions would have no effect, to the absurd idea that Russia did not need Western foreign exchange because it could print rubles in unlimited quantities.

Meanwhile, Putin has acknowledged "colossal difficulties" as a result of the sanctions.

The current report by researchers from Yale, which paints an extremely bleak picture of the Russian economy, fits in with this.

Western military experts attribute the lack of modern precision weapons and the poor build quality of some weapon systems in the Russian army to a lack of deliveries of western technology.

References to economic malaise in Russia are sometimes countered by saying that people are willing to make greater sacrifices in a dictatorship than in a Western prosperous democracy.

Therefore, Moscow will also win economically.

Putin's trolls on the extreme political right and left, in the media and in intellectual circles will not hesitate to verbally play people in Germany and individual European countries off against each other - all the more so as winter approaches.

But the West, despite its energy dependency, remains economically much stronger than Putin's Russia.

Democracy and the open society make it possible, especially in difficult times, to mobilize decentralized knowledge and to hold a debate about the best answers.

In this way, the necessary change can be initiated.

Because in a democracy, politics that act flexibly and undogmatically can benefit from the results of the debates, while in a dictatorship the center makes lonely decisions on the basis of more limited knowledge and at the same time greater dogmatism.