© TASS

The Spiegel magazine has prefaced its piece on the upcoming dissolution of the St. Petersburg Dialogue by stating that Russian President Vladimir Putin and then German Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder established this largest Russian-German public forum in order to reach mutual understanding between the two countries’ civil societies. And now it looks like a goner.

Indeed, is there any kind of dialogue plausible at a time when German howitzers are targeting Russian soldiers and civilians in Ukraine? Back in May, current Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is also a Social Democrat by the way, said "Russia should not win this war." Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock thoughtfully echoed him: "Of course, Russia must not win this war, but must strategically lose it." On top of that was Scholz’s "national address", in which he urged the people to utterly reconsider their attitude towards Russia and forget all the positive things that have connected us for decades.

Vladimir Putin and Gerhard Schroeder founded the St. Petersburg Dialogue as a public organization designed to promote rapprochement and mutual understanding between civil societies and the media of Russia and Germany. Initially, the meetings were annual – alternately in one country or another – and involved journalists, diplomats, scientists, businessmen and politicians from different parties. The latest one was held some three years ago in Bonn. The sessions stopped with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and over the "poisoning of Navalny and the war in Ukraine," Spiegel writes. Note that the forum’s "death" coincided with a deterioration between Berlin and Moscow after the Crimea had returned to Russia. Then Chancellor Angela Merkel doubted that the 2014 referendum featured the Crimeans’ free will, and considered the armed neo-Nazi coup in Kiev no big deal, just like other EU leaders and the United States.

Now Spiegel claims to have obtained a relevant document of the public organization’s board, stating that an extraordinary meeting is set for the 1st quarter of 2023. Its participants will nail down on the dissolution of "the once vital forum for the German and Russian civil societies to exchange their views." What Spiegel holds back is that to Berlin, St. Petersburg Dialogue has a mere side dish to the main meal – profitable economic cooperation with Moscow that made Germany Europe’s engine and provided for long-term welfare of its people.

And now that Washington curators have attained the destruction of Berlin’s much-irritating relationship with Moscow, depriving Germany of cheap Russian energy, the former is encouraged to become NATO’s primary combat unit. It means that in the long term, when it really comes to "the last Ukrainian", it will turn its arms against Russia, again. It would be naive to assume that Scholz, a Social Democrat, does not apprehend this. Otherwise, he would not have declared the following at a Bundeswehr development conference a week ago: "There is no more question about what we need to prepare for within NATO. Russia under President Putin is posing the greatest threat to our alliance."

Moreover, "Germany is ready to take a leading role, to assume responsibility for the security of our continent," Scholz stressed. The belligerent chancellor must be enjoying major support with the German parliament. Thus, Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces Eva Högl said in an interview with Bild am Sonntag that the country lacks ammunition, and demanded that the Scholz government allocate 20 billion euros to fill the gap. There can be little doubt that the Chancellor, who pledged to spend an annual 2+ percent of GDP on defense and provide an emergency fund with 100 billion euros to facilitate the increase, will hardly meet the parliament halfway. After all, he deems himself the savior of not only Ukrainian "democracy", but also "freedom" for the whole of Europe.

It is apparently for this purpose that Olaf Scholz and Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda signed a memorandum at the NATO summit in Madrid, which stipulates creating infrastructure in this former USSR republic within the next three years to accommodate a five-to-six-thousand-strong Bundeswehr brigade. Simultaneously, the German leader promised to keep supplying weaponry to Ukraine. At the same time, he could not but admit in another interview that up to 30% of Germans voting for a variety of parties were not supportive of his government’s anti-Russian sanctions and arms shipments to Kiev. However, this opinion seems to be of little interest to the new-style Social Democrat Olaf Scholz so far, as compared to the attractive adventure of another "Drang nach Osten" upon an overseas command. Well, he should have read more books on the history of WWII.