Germany

A brutal artillery battle: that’s what the latest phase of Russia’s war on Ukraine has become. Vladimir Putin failed in his original goal of seizing the entire country swiftly, beginning with the capital of Kyiv, and installing a puppet government. When Ukrainian resistance prevented that, Putin shifted to a smaller, more achievable objective: establishing complete control over two eastern provinces, Luhansk and Donetsk, which border Russia and are jointly known as the Donbas region. That’s where the war is being fought now, with an uncertain outcome. Victory will depend on who wins the artillery battle. Russia has more blunt firepower; Ukraine has more precise, longer-range weapons — or at least it will have them when more NATO supplies reach the frontlines.

Angela Merkel is one of the most recognizable names in modern politics and probably the only German chancellor since post-war leader Konrad Adenauer that Americans will remember. Merkel was the leader of the center-right CDU party and head of the German government for a full 16 years, making her one of the longest-serving chancellors in German history as well as the first woman to hold the post. Now the full scale of her disastrous reign is becoming clear. Following the nuclear power plant incident at Fukushima in 2011, Merkel began Germany's "Energiewende" (energy shift), intending to phase out of all of Germany's nuclear plants in favor of renewables.

The Europeans have been jolted awake from their deep Pax Americana slumber, when the continent was largely content to eat the spoils of economic prosperity and allow the United States to do the heavy lifting on all things security. And we have Vladimir Putin to thank for it. Russia’s nearly week-long invasion of Ukraine has shocked the conscience of many who believed Europe would never return to the dark days of large-scale land warfare.

Germany’s “halt” on the certification of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline on Tuesday is a classic case of too little, too late — a fact made all the more painfully clear in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Oil and gas still flow through Nord Stream 1 and many other Russian pipelines to Europe, and the continent has no choice but to keep importing the fossil fuels that finance Vladimir Putin’s offensive. We all saw this coming. Europe’s supposed “green” energy transition disregarded energy security and common sense, and Ukraine is now paying the price. The world will never tackle climate change if it's in a constant state of geopolitical energy insecurity, relying on authoritarian regimes like Russia and China to meet its basic needs.

A recent survey of Germans done by Forsa, amongst the most reputable polling institutions in that country, shows that at least in one way, the Cold War has not quite ended. A majority of West German respondents (52 percent) blame Russia for escalating the conflict with Ukraine, while a plurality of East German participants (43 percent) blame the United States. All respondents, meanwhile, plead for peace in the region and expressed fear of a looming war between Europe and Russia. The political repercussions here are very real. The generation born in the late 1960s, having been completely educated in the East German communist dictatorship, currently constitutes the most significant single voting block in the East.

Greta Thunberg is back in business. Previously slowed down by European pandemic restrictions, the Fridays For Future movement has now hit the streets, starting in Berlin. 'We must not give up, there is no going back now,' Thunberg told thousands of local protesters. The appeals and influence of her movement have translated, at least somewhat, into a stronger climate-focused youth vote in last month's German elections. The Green party has made significant advances in Parliament, becoming one of the kingmakers in upcoming coalition talks. Yet Germany’s environmentalists aren’t the only ones who outperformed their previous results. The liberal-democrat FDP scored 23 percent of Germany’s first-time voters, the same amount as the Greens.

Angela Merkel’s decision to allow more than one million migrants into Germany has caused a crisis in Germany’s prison system. About half the prisoners in Berlin and Hamburg are now foreign-born, according to the latest figures in the German press, and in prisons across the country, German is becoming a foreign language. This surge in outsiders on the inside coincides neatly with the 2015 decision to allow in migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. All regions of Germany report a ‘very strong increase’ in the number of foreign and stateless prisoners, according to data from the past three to five years. Prisons throughout Germany are overcrowded and struggling to handle the influx in population.