"This war doesn't last eight months, it lasts eight years"

For the past week, Putin has once again been targeting civilian targets in Ukraine. More than a hundred rockets hit Ukrainian cities, people on their way to work, playgrounds, apartment buildings.

This is how Anne Will's talk show began with a clip about the current situation in Ukraine: A man around fifty sits in the car and records his impressions in a video on his camera: "It's horrific to see that for it makes no difference where they shoot.” Vitali Klitschko, Mayor of Kyiv, speaks of genocide and adds: “Even a war has rules”.

German-Ukrainian journalist Marina Weisband, who was born in Kyiv, reported on her family in Ukraine, who told her "everything is fine with us, you don't have to worry". She found this mentality to be something very remarkable. Even if bombs fell in Kyiv, “the next day people would sit in street cafes again, out of a certain defiance, out of a love of freedom, out of rebelliousness.”

The publicist explained this with the history of the country: "This war doesn't last eight months, it lasts eight years," Weisband remarked, alluding to the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The war was designed to "organize terror, the civilian population to kill and to destroy Ukraine as a country.” Ukrainian society opposes this, summing up the developments to date.

Looking ahead to the coming months, Weisband is certain: The best thing that could happen to Putin now is "a freeze on the conflict, a ceasefire, so that he can then arm himself in peace and then start the new invasion in January or February."

Political scientist and Russia expert Sarah Pagung clearly disagreed. Putin does not want to try to establish a ceasefire at this point. With the "mobilization in Russia and the annexation of the areas in the Donbass" Putin is taking "everything that could be compromised for negotiations" out of the game and making negotiations impossible, according to Pagung.

Can you trust Putin with anything, Will asked the show's guests, alluding to Putin's threat of nuclear weapons. The Chair of the Defense Committee, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, reported on her visit to Chernobyl last week. He showed her again clearly "that Putin simply burns his own people."

The soldiers who occupied the Chernobyl site at the start of the war in February this year, digging trenches and drinking the water on site would suffer the consequences. In doing so, Putin was using a “nuclear narrative from day one, because of course he knows that this is also causing great concern in neighboring countries.” “The optimism is unbroken,” the FDP politician described the mood of her Ukrainian interlocutors.

"You have to take everything that the man does seriously," said Martin Schulz, former federal chairman of the SPD, summarizing the common basic conviction of the guests. However, opinions differed on the details. Schulz saw in Putin above all a KGB officer, "a secret service man" who was perfected in "deception" and "exhausting all options". But in the end it is "so that he never takes the step to destroy his own system."

For the Russian writer Viktor Erofeev, who emigrated from Moscow to Germany in the spring of 2022, Putin is above all "a man of war, a backyard thug." Today's Russia is now in a death throes, in an "agony". Russia itself is in agony and "any armed forces thrown at civilians are Putin's desperation."

And Putin? "He will do anything to avoid looking like a loser, everything." Nevertheless, Erofeyev interpreted the surprisingly strong Ukrainian population as proof that Putin could not win this war. Weisband has not seen Putin's greatest weapon in his threats of nuclear attacks. "Putin's strongest weapon is our fear," said the publicist.

From this, Weisband concluded on the question of how Germany and the West should deal with Putin's war of aggression: "The very best protection is the announcement of the consequences". While US President Biden last week spoke of "Armageddon" in connection with a nuclear attack by Russia, Schulz expressed himself much more cautiously.

The "success of the Western community of states lies in the fact that we act together," the SPD politician defended the Chancellor's previous brief. Strack-Zimmermann criticized the federal government: "We're doing a lot, but there's still room for improvement."

The political scientist Pagung proved this with the data available to her: According to this, the USA delivers just as much financial, military and humanitarian aid as all EU states and EU institutions combined. In the end it was "a war in Europe and you have to say it very clearly: without the USA we would be in a fix."