Andreas Ross, FAZ:

In der Konfrontation gegen eine erschütternd große Gruppe verhärteter Rechtsradikaler und eine noch größere Gruppe von Unzufriedenen in deren Windschatten hat Macron sein Heil nicht in taktischer Europaskepsis gesucht, wie es so viele europäische Politiker in ähnlicher Bedrängnis taten. Vielmehr hat er den Schneid besessen, für die EU als Lösung der Globalisierungsprobleme zu werben, sowohl der materiellen als auch der identitätspolitischen.

Nun muss er „liefern“. Also muss die EU liefern, und das geht nicht ohne Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz. Darum hängt auch für Macron viel von der Berliner „Zeitenwende“ ab. Wenn Scholz es schaffen sollte, dass sich Deutschland militärisch und politisch zu einer Säule europäischer Souveränität entwickelt, dann gewönne der deutsch-französische Motor einige Zugkraft.

Ω Ω Ω

Berlin findet in Paris einen Partner mit fünf Jahren Erfahrung, aber so viel Energie wie nach dem ersten Sieg.

Eine Krankenschwester
Die Jungs haben immer »Mama!« geschrien, wenn’s zu schlimm war, wenn die Schmerzen zu groß waren. Andere Namen hab ich nicht gehört.

—Swetlana Alexijewitsch, »Zinkjungen: Afghanistan und die Folgen«, (Berlin: Hanser, 2014), 42.

Wenn ich heimkehre, werde ich in kein einziges Militärmuseum mehr gehen …

—Swetlana Alexijewitsch, »Zinkjungen: Afghanistan und die Folgen«, (Berlin: Hanser, 2014), 29.

Alexander Neubacher, Spiegel:

Isar 2, Emsland und Neckarwestheim 2 helfen nicht nur dem Klima, sondern auch gegen den Krieg in der Ukraine. Noch ist es nicht zu spät, den Atomausstieg zu stoppen.

Atomkraftwerk Isar 2 bei Landshut Foto: Armin Weigel / picture alliance/dpa

Luke Harding (yes, that Luke Harding), Guardian:

The historian Anne Applebaum said the Russian government’s methods in Ukraine were darkly familiar. Today’s Moscow is replicating what Soviet forces did in occupied Poland, the Baltic states and the rest of central Europe in 1939, as well as at the end of the second world war. It was an “eerily precise repeat of the NKVD [Soviet secret police] and Red Army’s behaviour,” she said.

She added: “They have lists of people to arrest – mayors, museum directors, local leaders of all kinds. They systematically rape and murder civilians, in order to create terror. They deport other people en masse to Russia, to enhance their own depleted population. They eradicate local symbols – statues, flags, monuments – and put up their own.”

Applebaum said there was “one new twist” in Russia’s takeover of southern and eastern Ukraine, now the scene of a brutal battle for the Donbas. “Because modern Russia stands for nothing except corruption, nihilism, and Putin’s personal power, they have brought back Soviet flags as well as Lenin statues to symbolise Russian victory,” she said.

If in 2022 Ukraine Russia is eerily repeating the Red Army’s 1939 precise behaviour in the Baltic, does this mean Russia will soon be giving Lwów back to Poland? 🤔

Together with Dzhemal, Dugin began to dabble more and more in the politics of the perestroika era. ‘Those two, they wanted power. They were looking for any sort of elevator to the top, and they found it in fascism’, said Dudinsky.

—Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 162.

Timo Frasch, FAZ:

Ha­ben Sie das Foto gesehen, auf dem der ukrainische Präsident Selenskyj die Hand der EU-Parlamentspräsidentin Metsola fast zerquetscht, mit einem Unterarm, von dem Putin nur träumen kann?

One evening, a young man appeared at the Klyazma dacha, brought by an acquaintance. He looked no more than 18. His head was shaved, but he had an aristocratic bearing and a quick wit. He was immediately charismatic, and came carrying a guitar. Strumming away around a bonfire in the evening sunset, he belted out a song: ‘Fuck the Damned Sovdep’.⁷ Even by the extreme tastes of the mystical underground this was borderline stuff, calling for the mass murder of the Soviet leadership and conquest of the globe by Russian ‘legions’:

The fucking end of the Sovdep
Is just around the corner
Two million in the river
Two million in the oven
Our revolvers will not misfire.

‘We all just fell down and worshipped him’, said Dudinsky. ‘What a great song! He was like the messiah.’ His name was Alexander Dugin, and he was the newest recruit to the Moscow mystical underground.

7. Sovdep was a White Russian epithet for the Bolshevik leadership, dating from the 1920s.

—Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 154.

In fact, the coming demise of the Soviet Union would vindicate not only ‘primordialist’ theories of nationalism, like Gumilev’s, which saw nationalism as immanent, natural and essential, a fundamental, unchanging and practically genetic identity; the constructivists – those who believed that nationalism was a ‘construct’ created for social reasons or out of political expediency – also proclaimed victory, and with some justification: the Soviet Union fell apart not along true national lines, but along those of largely artificial nations identified by Soviet ethnographers and cartographers in the 1920s. In other words, according to political scientists such as Rogers Brubaker, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and other republics sought independence from the USSR not due to some strong primordial ethnic unity, but rather due to the simple fact that they had been given artificial statehood. In the right circumstances (wide-ranging economic crisis, combined with a real fear of the rise of Russian nationalism) this was simple to translate into real statehood. Not a single ethnic group that was not given national status by Soviet ethnographers bothered to revolt against authority in 1991 (though later, Chechnya would).

—Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 144.

Wimbledon.com:

…it would be unacceptable for the Russian regime to derive any benefits from the involvement of Russian or Belarusian players with The Championships.

It is therefore our intention, with deep regret, to decline entries from Russian and Belarusian players to The Championships 2022.