More recently, Russia was perceived in Germany as a strategic partner, and now, increasingly as a potential enemy. Mood swings are particularly noticeable in the German media.
“After more than twenty years after the end of the cold war the question arose: how to behave with the strategic adversaries?”. This was the last and, in fact, the key phrase of the comment, the radio station Deutschlandfunk on the results of the recent visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin, in Berlin for talks in the “Normandy format”. The phrase rezanulo ear, as directly and politically incorrect Russia to strategic enemies of Germany by German journalists, especially in public-legal media, are still not counted.
A third of Germans fear “armed clashes”
On the contrary, until recently, Russia was considered to be a strategic partner of the European Union and Germany, and not only in the energy sector. Brussels and Berlin even offered Moscow a special partnership for modernisation. The annexation of Crimea and armed expansion in the East of Ukraine (“Novorossiya” Project) put an end to rapprochement, but until very recently, the Germans stubbornly refused to believe in a new cold war with Russia. And suddenly here we are talking already about the possibility of war hot. Or, at least, of the military conflict.
According to a survey conducted on 20 and 21 October by authoritative sociological Institute Forsa commissioned by the magazine Stern, a third of Germans fear “armed clashes between Russia and the West.” However, two-thirds of respondents such fears have still not mastered, but the trend is clear: what you never believed no one except the fringe, now a part of society no longer excluded. The unthinkable is now considered feasible.
A poll for Stern magazine does not answer the question of who, exactly, according to the respondents, the danger comes from these “armed clashes”. For most German media, the answer is obvious: a source of military threats is Russia.
Bild praises us nuclear weapons
Here’s what he wrote, for example, on the day of arrival of the Russian President in the German capital the largest mass-tabloid in Germany, Bild newspaper: “In the time interval between the previous and current Putin’s visit to Berlin met: 1236 days, three wars (Crimea, Eastern Ukraine, Syria), the downed Malaysian passenger plane MH17 (298 dead), four foiled the truce only in Ukraine (more than 10 thousand dead), EU sanctions against Russia and Russia’s involvement in the Syrian civil war with countless civilian casualties and bombs even in hospitals and children”. The conclusion of the publication: “a New cold war is hot”.
In other comments, published on 26 October on the website of the newspaper, Bild argues with Russian propagandists and German pacifists, asserting that “there is no good or bad bombs”: “the U.S. nuclear weapons have always been better than the Russian (or Pakistani or Chinese) because it is controlled and overseen by politicians who are showing much more respect for human life and will of their constituents”.
Such eulogies nuclear weapons, the German media refused even from atoms for peace, was not, perhaps, since the early 1980-ies, when in Europe in response to the Soviet Union placing medium-range missiles SS-20 were established by the American “Pershing”. Bild directly refers to the period of tough confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union, quoting born in those years in Germany a saying: “Better “Pershing” in the garden than the SS-20 in the roof.”
Support allies in Eastern Europe
That Russia is a threat to Europe, the USA and the West in General that is from a military point of view, often write now many publications. A solid conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung asked, for example, to the unfolding military operations in cyberspace and bluntly called a spade a spade: “the Internet is a war. Non-standard, without physical violence, subtle and full of tricks. It is Russia against the United States, and this is the first cold cyberwar”.
And here is how it begins reprinted in many German editions of the article of the news Agency dpa about the forthcoming deployment of a NATO battalion under German management in Lithuania: “He who looks down the barrel of a Leopard 2, will think twice whether to attack a German patrol. Such phrases usually describe the deterring impression battle tank of the Bundeswehr. Now he first goes to the close proximity to the borders of Russia”.
The battalion’s mission is to send a strong signal to Eastern allies that Germany is serious about their anxieties that arose after the in 2014 Russia annexed the Crimea underlines the dpa. At the same time, the article notes that the move may be another test for relations between Berlin and Moscow. So the number of those who is afraid of a military conflict between the West and Russia, even a random incident, at the next poll may increase.
