After Russia’s attack on Ukraine, many experts also expect the war to progress quickly – and learn better after a few weeks. In the summer, television philosopher Richard David Precht called for the West to press for a negotiated solution. Now he says he was wrong about the beginning of the war.
Book author and TV philosopher Richard David Precht admitted that he made misjudgments at the beginning of the Ukraine war. “Bringing Ukraine into a position of strength has been much more successful than almost all observers, including myself, dared to hope,” Precht said on Monday evening at the “Rheinische Post” meeting in Düsseldorf. “Back then, with a few exceptions, the military experts all made the same prognosis and said that Ukraine would lose this war within days, weeks or maybe a month or two.”
“We only now know how unbelievably strong the Ukrainian army was right from the start, before the arms deliveries came,” Precht claimed. “In this respect, I naturally made the wrong assumption that it’s not worth defending yourself if the war is lost in a week or two. You can see how wrong you can be.”
At the end of June, Precht was one of the signatories to an open letter calling for negotiations to end the Ukraine war as quickly as possible. In addition, the celebrities questioned whether arms deliveries from the West were the right way. They were sharply criticized for this by the then Ambassador of Ukraine in Germany, Andriy Melnyk.
The strength of the Ukrainian military had been underestimated not only by Russia but also by many experts in the West. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the state upgraded and reformed its army and introduced NATO operational procedures.
