It was a short visit and a long text, and both promised badly.
The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Selenskyj came to Berlin, met with Chancellor Merkel, asked for the construction of Nord Stream 2 to be stopped and for weapons and was politely but firmly refused.
On the same day, Russian ruler Vladimir Putin published an article with the menacing title “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” in which he bluntly claims that the Ukrainian state is in itself a weapon of mass destruction directed against Russia.
You have to let that melt on your tongue: Because the Ukraine no longer allows Russians and Ukrainians to be one people, the Russian people could shrink by hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.
In general, the Ukraine is an invention of the West, the “Anti-Russia” project.
This nasty project, Putin said, was started in the Middle Ages by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Catholic Church, so it was only logical that today's Ukrainian rulers sympathized with the Nazis.
Exhibition of one's own uneducation
So it goes over 40,000 characters, twenty book pages in the familiar format. It is not easy to fight your way through this huge (the word “violent” would probably fit even better). Some Russian and Ukrainian historians did so, showing numerous false assertions, misrepresentations, and anachronisms. This display of one's own ignorance would be almost funny if it weren't for the annexation of Crimea, the ongoing occupation of parts of the Donbass and passages like this: Ukraine should have left the Soviet Union in 1992 within the borders of 1922.
Putin does not mention that many areas that are in Russia today were part of Ukraine in 1922. He is not interested in them at all, but in the Ukrainian regions of Galicia, Northern Bukovina, Transcarpathia and the area around Odessa, which the USSR annexed from Poland, Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1939-48. Moscow made offers to participate in the smashing of Ukraine to some of these countries as early as 2014. At that time, the proposal came from the far-right provocateur Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whose function in today's Russia is primarily to articulate particularly radical ideas of the Kremlin in order to promote the Test reactions. Now the impetus comes directly from Putin, although it is not entirely clear whether he is not claiming these regions for himself. Ukraine has no statehood of its own anyway,claims the Russian head of state, and today it is completely ruled from outside anyway, namely, as in 1918, by the Germans.
In recent years Ukraine, the poorest country in Europe, has enriched itself with Russian gas, today it clings to gas transit payments and poses as a victim of aggression. The NATO infrastructure is already being installed in Ukraine. Real Ukraine, which does not exist in Putin's imagination, can only dream of integration with NATO. This wish is just as unheard of as Zelenskyi's plea to put an end to the nightmare of Nord Stream 2. We are one people, writes Putin, a sovereign Ukraine only exists with Russia and the road to peace, which Ukraine is now rejecting, was agreed in Minsk. "Germany will accompany Ukraine on this path amicably"said the Chancellor, referring to Minsk, at the press conference with Zelenskyi, smiling as mildly as a dying companion in the hospice.