Just a week ago, Germany was the weak link in the Western coalition trying to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to dial down the crisis in Ukraine. This week, Germany, the richest country in Europe and with the greatest political empathy towards Russia, has thrown its lot with its European and American partners to stand up against Putin’s war in Ukraine.
In a major speech at a special session of the Bundestag convened on Sunday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared that the Russian invasion of Ukraine marks a “turning point in Europe”. “Putin is not just seeking to wipe an independent country off the map. He is demolishing the European security order that had prevailed for almost half a century”, Scholz said. Scholz has outlined a five-pronged response — military solidarity with Ukraine, punitive measures against Putin’s Russia, vigorous commitment to European collective defence through NATO, German rearmament, and a reduction in Germany’s energy and economic interdependence with Russia. These are a radical set of new policies that profoundly alter the geopolitical orientation of Germany as well as Europe.
Germany has long provided the European parallel to India’s political warmth towards and strategic dependence on Russia. As Germany and Europe rise up against Putin’s aggression, Delhi too will have to come to terms, sooner than later, with the impact of Putin’s reckless course on India’s long-term interests.
As a nuclear power, Delhi can’t view with any detachment Putin’s decision to throw the nuclear card into the Ukraine battlefield. If Putin persists with his messianic attempt to reconstruct the Russian empire, Delhi has no reason to be seen as supporting the Kremlin’s imperial project in Europe.
In India and beyond in the global South, Russia’s traditional image was that of a natural ally against Western imperialism. Today, many developing countries will join the West in the United Nations General Assembly in voting against Putin’s attempt to destroy another nation.
Although it did not get much notice in India, in one of his recent speeches, Putin denounced the founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, for emphasising the importance of autonomy for various nationalities in revolutionary Russia. Lenin, who saw Czarist Russia as a “prison house of nationalities”, insisted that the Soviet Union must be a federation of national republics rather than simply a communist version of the Russian empire.
