The policy of Olaf Scholz, which he identifies as “prudent” and which consists in helping Ukraine in the struggle for survival against the annihilation attack of the Russian army with as few weapons as possible or in such a way that Vladimir Putin does not understand this as the action of a “war party”, finds supporters. According to the survey institute Forsa, 65 percent of German citizens thought the Chancellor’s line was correct. 56 Percent feared that the war could spread to other countries in Europe if more weapons were supplied to Ukraine.
This is also the view of the 28 first signatories of an open letter published by the magazine “Emma” on Friday. Alice Schwarzer, Alexander Kluge, Martin Walser, Reinhard Merkel, Reinhard Mey, Dieter Nuhr, Gerhard Polt, Edgar Selge, Antje Vollmer, Peter Weibel, Ranga Yogeshwar, Juli Zeh and others believe that Scholz is acting correctly.
Who is the victim here and who is the perpetrator?
They call on him to “neither directly nor indirectly, to deliver more heavy weapons to Ukraine”. It is true that “Russian aggression should be regarded as a violation of the basic norm of international law”. There is also “a principled political-moral duty” to “not to retreat from aggressive violence without resistance”. But find these “limits in other precepts of political ethics”. One should not accept the “manifest” risk of escalation. The “supply of large quantities of heavy weapons” could “make Germany a war party itself”. A Russian counter-strike could “trigger the case of assistance under the NATO treaty and thus the immediate danger of a world war. The second boundary line is the level of destruction and human suffering among the Ukrainian civilian population. Even the justified resistance to an aggressor is at some point in an intolerable disproportion to this.”
It is a mistake “that the responsibility for the danger of an escalation to a nuclear conflict only concerns the original aggressor and not also those who provide him with a motive for criminal action if necessary. And on the other hand, that the decision on the moral responsibility of the further ‘cost’ of human lives among the Ukrainian civilian population falls exclusively within the competence of their government. Morally binding norms are of a universal nature.“
