Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Germany will continue sending heavy weapons to Ukraine, adding that it was the country’s historical responsibility to help the government in Kyiv defend itself against Russian aggression.
Scholz made the comments during a speech on Sunday to mark the 77th anniversary of the Allied victory in the second world war.
“We have learned a central lesson from the disastrous history of our country between 1933 and 1945,” Scholz said in the televised address. “No more war. No more genocide. No more tyranny.”
“In the present situation that can mean only one thing: we defend justice and freedom — at the side of the victim. We support Ukraine in its fight against the aggressor.” Not doing so, he added, would be like “capitulating to brute force”.
Scholz’s speech reflected the shift in his thinking on arming Ukraine. He had initially ruled out providing Kyiv with heavy weapons such as tanks and armoured vehicles, saying it could make Germany a party to the war and trigger a nuclear conflict with Russia.
But in recent days Scholz has changed his tune. On Friday, the government announced it would provide Ukraine with seven self-propelled howitzers, a type of artillery piece known as the PzH 2000. That followed a decision to give Kyiv about 50 Gepard (“Cheetah”) anti-aircraft guns.
Officials have made clear that these will not be the last such deliveries. “For the first time in our postwar history we have sent weapons — including heavy weapons — into a war zone, on a large scale and always carefully weighing it up,” Scholz said. “And we will continue to do so.”
The decision to step up military aid to Kyiv has proven controversial. The renowned feminist Alice Schwarzer was one of a number of intellectuals who signed an open letter to the government late last month expressing fears that German deliveries of heavy weapons could lead to a third world war.
Scholz acknowledged that many Germans had “concerns that the war will spread and that our peace could be jeopardised”. People should be allowed to express such fears, he said.
“But at the same time it is important to say that fear mustn’t paralyse us,” he added.
Scholz insisted, however, that Germany would “take no decisions that would turn Nato into a party to this war”. Berlin would also not do anything that “harmed us and our partners more than Russia”.
Scholz’s opinion poll ratings have slumped in recent days amid mounting scrutiny of his policies in Ukraine, with critics accusing him of hesitancy and indecision over arming Kyiv.
Early projections of results from a regional election on Sunday in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein indicated that his Social Democrats dropped almost 12 points to third place behind the Christian Democrats and the Greens, in the party’s worst-ever result there.
The German chancellor said this year’s commemoration of the end of the second world war “was like no other”. Seventy-seven years after the capitulation of Nazi Germany, “brute force” was once again laying waste to a European country, with Russia’s army “murdering men, women and children, completely destroying cities and even attacking refugees”.
Scholz said the fact that Putin was trying to justify Russia’s attack on Ukraine as a fight against Nazism was “disgraceful” and a “falsification of history”.
