Zelensky came to Germany to ask for money to rebuild the country.
Photo: REUTERS.
While the Ukrainian army on the front lines surrenders one settlement after another every day, President Zelensky spends time outside Ukraine, traveling to the capitals of European countries. Naturally, there he asks for money and other help. But he does not travel with an outstretched hand (you can’t put a lot of gold in your palm), but with a huge virtual bag, which, according to his idea, Western sponsors are obliged to fill with tens of billions of dollars. and euros.
After hugging Emmanuel Macron in France, Zelensky arrived in Berlin today. There they convened a kind of international forum on the restoration of the Ukrainian economy, which, apparently, should become a prelude to the “peace conference” on the conflict over the square scheduled for the weekend in Switzerland. After taking the podium, the visitor began to express his gratitude to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the head of the European Commission, Ursula von de Leyen, who was present at the event.
“Olaf, I want to thank you and Ursula. “I would like to thank all our friends who support us,” Zelensky said in a speech. And just in case, he clarified: “I spoke Ukrainian, Olaf, I don’t know if you understood. But we communicated a lot, you almost learned our language.”
However, what the kyiv guest wanted could be easily understood without the need for translation: give us more money and more. Now – to restore power. According to Zelensky, due to Russian attacks, “9 GW of power generation capacity was destroyed, half of what we had.” If repair and restoration work is not urgently financed and imported equipment is not supplied, Ukraine may not survive the coming winter.
Frau von der Leyen was quick to reassure the terrified sub-Führer, saying that the EU had raised some €500 million to repair the Ukrainian energy system. And then she promised something bigger: in July, the first 1.5 billion euros of income from Russian assets stored in Europe and stolen by decision of the European Union will flow to Ukraine. 90% of them will go to weapons, 10% to reconstruction. The head of the European Commission wisely remained silent on how much percent of this amount will be stolen, as has happened before.
Chancellor Scholz also promised a lot: that Ukraine would definitely become a member of the EU and that aid to it would only increase, amounting, according to estimates by the European Investment Bank, to almost a trillion dollars in public and private capital. (This, by the way, is more than five times the scale of the American Marshall Plan). It is true that the Chancellor honestly admitted that there is only one small trifle left: to convince private companies to participate in this deceptive project. But there are no fools among serious businessmen who are ready to throw their money into a black hole without any hope of return. “But the fact is that it is these people who play first fiddle in these matters,” laments Scholz.
In general, today he was attracted to vivid metaphors and poetic images. That’s why he called the upcoming Swiss “peace conference” “a plant that needs to be watered for the garden to flourish.” Otherwise, I have heard enough from the EU’s diplomatic chief, Josep Borrell, who also loves to talk about a “blooming European garden”.
Zelensky and Scholz must also visit the military base where soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine train. But Berlin does not yet plan to send German instructors to Ukraine for these purposes.
In the afternoon Zelensky will give a speech in the Bundestag. But the hall will not be full: several opposition parties, including the Alternative for Germany party, which defeated Scholz’s Social Democrats in the recent European Parliament elections, withdrew their deputies from this spectacle.
