There were exactly two surprises in this edition of "Maybrit Illner".

On the one hand, Illner did not appear, but her colleague Theo Koll. He said at the beginning: "Maybrit Illner is called Theo Koll today as an exception. We wish the trusted host of this round, who unfortunately tested positive for corona, a mild course and a speedy recovery. "

Christian Geyer Hindemith

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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On the other hand, the show surprised by the fact that it got by without the dashing tone that is currently in the supposedly cleaned air;

without the rhetorical onslaught of unambiguousness, euphoric from your own feelings of change, in which you always think you have known everything, but now finally, finally, finally want to draw the still outstanding (and then mostly speechless) consequences.

The main thing is completely, no longer half-heartedly, hesitantly and deliberately.

For such provocative deliberation, which understands war as a Moloch that devours everything, the dashing as well as the struggling;

The communications of Robert Habeck, the Vice Chancellor, as well as yesterday at Illner/Koll, stand for this impossibility of making a clean sweep.

Herr Habeck, is Germany really doing everything it can to help Ukraine (as if there were an absolutely necessary level of support that would turn the tide of the war)?

No, it doesn't, not for good reasons, Habeck tends to reply, for example to avoid entering into a dynamic towards the Third World War.

The one step that leads to Germany becoming a party to the war represents the necessary border.

A border along which the Ukrainian President rightly feels "betrayed and sold", said Habeck when asked by Koll about Selenskyj's video appearance in the German Bundestag.

Selenskyj's speech was "completely justified from his point of view", but "not completely justified from the point of view of the federal government and Germany".

Because, as the Vice Chancellor asserted: "Germany is doing a lot to support Ukraine and a lot of things that we considered impossible weeks ago."

This aroused desire for clarity

In other words, Habeck cultivates the imperative to think diverging things together without again mixing past political mistakes with the need to keep a cool head in the present.

He is against wanting to clean up the past at the expense of a rationality required for the present.

With this, with this complexity requirement, Habeck frustrates the aroused desire for clarity.

He promises more clarity than he can keep when he pretends that the boundary between the conflict and the war party can be defined by a single step.

Erich Vad, Brigadier General a.

D. of the Bundeswehr, drew attention to the fact that this border is in reality fluid and also depends on what the opponent thinks, where it runs.

In the case of Putin, a recognizable unpredictable question.

In any case, General Habeck jumped in when he identified a nuclear escalation as a realistic threat.

That gives the current situation a “different quality” than it did in Iraq or Afghanistan.

How can we now support the securing of no-fly zones as the supposedly morally and strategically necessary option?

Germany must help make the skies above Ukraine safer, said Ukrainian Ambassador Andriy Melnyk.

That would be a step into the world war, countered Vad.

Undignified party polemics in the Bundestag

Basically, the FDP politician Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, Chairwoman of the Defense Committee, also contradicted being carried away in totalities, while at the same time she put on record her anxiety at listening to Selenskyj speaking at the risk of her life in Parliament, where she herself was "in the warm". sit.

Nevertheless, the moment of the undignified came from Christian Democratic "party polemics": Friedrich Merz insisted on changing an agenda that the Union had agreed to the day before.

Regardless of what the outcome of a substantive debate after Zelenskyi's speech might have been, it was ultimately the agenda debate itself that proved the SPD foreign policy expert Michael Roth right when he said: Parliament has neither "orientation and encouragement" nor "Empathy and sensitivity" shown.

On the show, it was Vad again who combined psychological and strategic dilemmas.

Despite "considerable gains in territory", the Russian units are in a fatal situation.

They are faced with the realization: obviously there is no short war, but one is moving into a long-lasting war, in a local and house-to-house battle and then in a tough guerrilla war.

The Americans also smashed the Iraqi forces within two or three weeks and occupied Baghdad, "but then the war actually began."

The fighting morale of the Ukrainians is geared precisely to this, and their military motivation is unparalleled: "They sit in the cities, wait for the enemy and will fight." It's not a bad ending to a talk show if the slogans get stuck in your throat afterwards.