Despite the German public’s broad support for the military assistance of Ukraine and a consensus on this issue within the German government, there are still voices calling out to stop such assistance. On February 25, a rally “Stand up for peace!” was announced at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the main purpose of which is to demand that the German government stops arms supplies to Ukraine. As such demand is in accordance with the official agenda of the Kremlin, while its initiators have close ties with both the USSR and modern Russia, this event and its organizers deserve special attention.
The initiators of the rally are the owner of the German feminist media platform EMMA, Alice Schwarzer; Bundestag deputy from the pro-Russian leftist Die Linke party, Sahra Wagenknecht; and former Bundeswehr General, Erich Vad.
Among the organizers, Erich Vad, who is also the ex-security adviser to Chancellor Angela Merkel, deserves the most attention because of his ties with one of the most wanted criminals in the world, Jan Marsalek. The latter is accused of working for Russian intelligence, in particular, in the Novichok case, and now remains in Russia under the protection of the FSB. The German government is demanding Marsalek’s extradition from the Russian government.
In 2017, Erich Vad participated in a dialogue on security affairs with former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, which was funded by Jan Marsalek and took place at the Käfer restaurant in Munich. German experts suspect Erich Wad’s connections with Bernd Schmidbauer, a former chief of intelligence in the times of Helmut Kohl, and Jan Marsalek in one of the major scandals in German history involving the fraud of at least 1.9 billion euros in Wirecard AG.
In 2019, Erich Wad, during a seminar on security policy at the Reinhold-Würth-Haus in Bad Mergentheim, called the occupied Crimea «historically Russian territory recaptured from the Turks.»
The co-organizer of the action, Alice Schwarzer, is a former member of the left-wing feminist movement Mouvement de libération des femme in France and the left-wing Frauenbewegung movement in Germany in the 70s, heavily influenced by the USSR and Soviet feminists. Schwarzer systematically takes the position in favor of the policy of the Russian Federation, after 2014, justifying the Russian occupation of Crimea in the article “Why I understand Putin despite everything” as well as after February 24, 2022.
At the end of the last year, on November 29, on the air of the German TV channel ARD, Alice Schwarzer again stated that «the United States is waging a proxy war against Russia», and German arms supplies to Ukraine «are dragging out the war.»
The third co-organizer of the rally is one of the leading politicians of the German leftist party Die Linke, Sarah Wagenknecht. In 1989 she joined the (then ruling) East German Communist Party. In her statements, Wagenknecht called the GDR «the best Germany» and the wall between the FRG and the GDR «a necessary evil.» After 2014, Wagenknecht recognized the “legitimacy of the referendum” in Crimea, justifying the occupation of the peninsula, and called the Ukrainian authorities a “fascist regime.” In 2023, Wagenknecht justifies an already full-scale war against Ukraine, calling it a «brutal but inevitable special military operation.»
In 2019, Sarah Wagenknecht founded the left-wing movement Get Up, one of the goals of which was «rectification of relations and rapprochement with Moscow». After the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in October 2022, the “Get up” movement, together with Ulrich Heiden, a German journalist based in Moscow since the 1990s, who worked as an observer at the “referendums” in the “DPR” and “LPR”, held a video conference “Russia from within”, the subject of which was the argumentation of the legitimacy of «referendums» in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, occupied by the Russian army.
The organization of the February 25 rally is accompanied by an appeal by Schwarzer, Wade, and Wagenknecht to the German public to sign the so-called «Peace Manifesto». The manifesto is based on the key narratives of the Russian Federation and Russian diplomacy which are the «threat of nuclear war as a result of the supply of weapons to Ukraine», «the need for dialogue for the sake of peace», etc.
On the day the manifesto was published, 69 German cultural and art figures, politicians, and social activists became its signatories.
Among the first signatories of the manifesto was Antje Vollmer, ex-Vice President of the Bundestag from the Alliance 90/The Greens party, a German politician and a former activist of the Maoist Anti-Imperialist League (Liga gegen den Imperialismus). She was a member of the German committee of the Petersburg Dialogue Club, created under the patronage of Russian President Vladimir Putin and ex-Chancellor of Germany, current member of the board of Gazprom, Gerhard Schröder. In 2014, Vollmer justified the occupation of Crimea by referring to the Kosovo case, which was the argument used by Vladimir Putin to prove the “legitimacy” of the occupation of Crimea.
Among politicians, one of the first signatories was also Peter Gauweiler, ex-deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU. In 2014, Gauweiler, like most other organizers of the rally, justified the occupation of Crimea, referring to Solzhenitsyn’s letter to Yeltsin about «Novorossia» and the territories beyond the Dnieper, «which never belonged to Ukraine.» At the opening of the Year of the German Language and Literature in Moscow in September 2014, Gauweiler criticized Germany’s sanctions policy against the Russian Federation, calling it «cowardly.»
Among the cultural figures who signed the Manifesto is the well-known, both in Germany and in Russia, artist Peter Weibel. Born in the Ukrainian RSR in Odesa, he artist emphasizes, that his ancestors moved there thanks to the invitation of the Russian Empress Catherine II. Peter Weibel is closely associated with the Russian cultural environment, in particular, he was the curator of the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. Already after the occupation of Crimea in 2014, Peter Weibel repeatedly held his own exhibitions in Moscow, for example, «Peter Weibel: Technorevolution» (2015), and «Facing the Future: The Art of Europe 1945 — 1968» (2017). In 2015 Peter Weibel became an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts in Moscow.
It is worth noting that, starting from April 2022, almost all of the above-mentioned persons have been signatories of appeals to Chancellor Olaf Scholz on the need to stop arms supplies to Ukraine.
Based on the foregoing, one can conclude that the basis of the campaign demanding to stop the supply of weapons to Ukraine, initiated by the mentioned people, is by no means a desire for peace, but their personal ties with the USSR, Russia, and longstanding pro-Russian policy.
Taras Mokliak, within the joint project of the Centre for Defence Reforms and Guildhall news agency, revealing Russian hybrid influence on Western countries.
Только главные новости в нашем Telegram, Facebook и GoogleNews!
Tweet