Leading German newspapers and magazines have voiced alarm at Trump’s increasingly critical stance towards Ukraine and the prospect of a summit with the Russian and Chinese leaders.
“In Moscow they are cheering”, Die Zeit wrote, with commentator Michael Thumann saying Trump “is once again turning away from Ukraine” and appears deaf to arguments from Europe.
Thumann said Putin wanted the summit in China to become a second Yalta, a reference to the 1945 meeting at which Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin divided up Europe. Putin now wanted to carve out spheres of influence worldwide, discuss nuclear arms and settle Ukraine’s fate, he said.
He said Putin was nearing “the apogee of his influence on U.S. policy” and was exploiting Trump’s weakness in numerous telephone calls. Putin knew he did not have much time, Thumann added, as Trump’s position could weaken after the November 3 congressional elections.
“Putin wants to bring about a decision this winter”, Thumann said. Europeans, he said, would have to back Ukraine not only without American financial input but increasingly against Trump, and would need unity.
Sueddeutsche Zeitung commentator Hubert Wetzel wrote that Trump was indifferent to Ukraine’s fate and that “now everything depends on Europe”.
“Donald Trump’s government is helping Russia to kill men, women and children in Ukraine”, Wetzel said, referring to the blocking of information about incoming missiles and curbs on deliveries of air-defence missiles.
Wetzel said Trump, frustrated by what he called a disastrous war against Iran, was targeting Ukraine as the weakest scapegoat available. Appeals to Trump to change course were like “casting spells against the plague”, he wrote.
“If Europe wants Ukraine to withstand the war with Russia, it must itself take care of money and weapons”, he said.
Writing in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Nikolas Busse said Trump wanted to keep Ukraine’s president away from negotiations while being ready to discuss Ukraine with Putin and Xi. German policy should conclude it was better not to count on the United States, he wrote.
The answer could not be submission to Russia, as the far-right AfD wanted, but greater European independence, Busse said.
Handelsblatt called a summit of Trump, Xi and Putin a “nightmare for Europe”, recalling the 1945 Potsdam conference, and saying it would signal that great powers were dividing spheres of influence “over the heads of those concerned”.
Die Welt said a summit with Xi and Trump but without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would be a “double gift” for Putin, amounting to a diplomatic rehabilitation of Russia and a chance to strike a deal on Ukraine without Ukraine.
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Source: PAP