Ukraine is at war with Russia. There is no doubt about it. But are Germany and NATO also a war party? With a bold tweet, Minister of Health Lauterbach ventures forward on this issue. His party colleague Lambrecht contradicts immediately.
Federal Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht has contradicted her cabinet and party colleague Karl Lauterbach on Germany’s role in the Ukraine war. “It’s very clear – both for the German government and for NATO as a whole: we will not become a war party,” said the SPD politician on the ARD program “Report from Berlin”. Federal Minister of Health Lauterbach had previously written on Twitter: “We are at war with Putin”.
With his tweet on Saturday, the SPD politician referred to statements by the writer Richard David Precht. He had demanded that individual NATO states should guarantee Russia that Ukraine would not be included in the alliance. “Let’s be honest: What should kneeling before Putin do now?” Lauterbach wrote. “We are at war with Putin and not his psychotherapists. Victory in the form of the liberation of Ukraine must be consistently pursued.” It doesn’t matter whether the “psyche” of Russian President Vladimir Putin can cope.
Lambrecht, on the other hand, emphasized on ARD that the principle of not becoming a party to the war “has guided us from the start. And that hasn’t changed either.” The minister returned from a visit to Ukraine on Sunday. Among other things, she met her Ukrainian colleague Oleksiy Resnikov in the port city of Odessa. During her visit there was an air alert: “We experienced that twice in a few hours and had to move it to a bunker,” said Lambrecht. “And for the people that’s reality there. That’s everyday life.”
Lauterbach is the first federal minister to say that Germany is “at war” with Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to the Bundestag Research Service, the concept of war in the classic sense of international law is characterized by: an armed struggle between states or groups of states and a declaration of war or an ultimatum. It is noted that some international law scholars dispense with the latter feature and define war as a violent act involving the severing of diplomatic relations.
Before Lauterbach, Finance Minister Christian Lindner had already spoken of an “energy war” when he also campaigned on Twitter for the further use of nuclear energy. Lauterbach received both approval and opposition on Twitter. His tweet was commented on and shared thousands of times.
