Mayor of Ukrainian capital begs Germany for weapons as Zelensky gets nervous

Klitschko made that appeal as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko huddled in Moscow to oversee major military exercises, including nuclear weapons drills scheduled for this weekend. Western officials suspect that Putin has used those war games as a fig leaf to obscure his invasion plans, which prompted the United States and several European countries to provide new lethal weapons to Ukraine, but Germany has declined to arm the Ukrainians.

“For us, it’s not an easy decision,” Baerbock replied to Klitschko.

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Earlier in her address to the conference, Baerbock cited German “history” as a partial explanation for Berlin’s unwillingness to send weapons to Kyiv. That was an apparent reference to the “strong legacy of guilt linked to the Nazi regime and the more than 20 million deaths in the Soviet Union,” as Stefan Meister, international order and democracy director of the German Council on Foreign Relations, wrote recently.

In her response to Klitschko, she added that German officials worry that arming Ukraine would jeopardize their ability to broker a diplomatic off-ramp via the Normandy Format, the forum that Germany, France, Russia, and Ukraine have used to negotiate a pair of deals, known as the Minsk agreements, that seemed to chart a course for peace but have not been implemented.

“If we are endangering by taking these steps that Normandy would not work anymore, this would be, in my point of view, also [a] big security threat for every citizen in Ukraine,” Baerbock said. “It’s very crucial that we are coming back at the table to talk about Minsk.”

Russia has participated in the Normandy Format while posing as a mediator in a putative Ukrainian civil war, rather than admit that Russian troops are involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s team has demanded throughout the recent crisis that France and Germany press Ukraine to implement the Minsk agreements in the manner that Russia desires, which would entrench Russian proxies in Ukraine’s political system and empower Moscow to restrict Kyiv’s ability to choose its own foreign policy.

With that in mind, Ukrainian officials often have interpreted the military mobilization as an elaborate mind game, designed to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to make major concessions in negotiations over the frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine, but his team acknowledged that the threats might lead him to cancel his own appearance in Munich.

“Now we are observing the situation, which is getting more and more dramatic,” Zelensky spokesman Sergii Nykyforov told NBC. “If there is a dramatic escalation or some worrying messages, then he might change his mind. As of now, we are still waiting to see what is going to happen.”

President Joe Biden’s administration reportedly worries that Zelensky’s planned trip to the conference could leave Ukraine even more vulnerable to attack.

“His absence from Ukraine will degrade his ability to coordinate a response to any Russian attack and create more propitious circumstances for a Russian-sponsored attempt at a coup d’etat,” the Institute for the Study of War’s Frederick Kagan and Mason Clark wrote Friday. “Russian forces could close Ukrainian airspace to prevent Zelensky from returning to Kyiv.”

The Zelensky team’s acknowledgment of that risk evinces more anxiety than Ukrainian officials have displayed throughout the crisis, and even earlier on Friday.

“Our intelligence sees all the maneuvers that pose a potential threat to Ukraine,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said during an address to Parliament. “We in no way lessen the threat, but the possibility of full-scale escalation we deem as small.”

Yet Russian proxies in eastern Ukraine announced an evacuation and accused the Ukrainian military of shelling their positions in advance of some sort of Ukrainian operation to recapture the Russian-controlled territory. Ukrainian officials have denied having any intention to launch such an attack — such an offensive would quickly bring the Ukrainian military into conflict with a vastly superior Russian force — and issued their own warning that “Russian special services” are plotting to bomb “a number of social infrastructure facilities” in the Russian-controlled territory of eastern Ukraine.

“These measures are aimed at destabilizing the situation in the temporarily occupied territories of our state and creating grounds for accusing Ukraine of terrorist acts,” the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine announced on Twitter. “The Defense Intelligence of the State Security Service of Ukraine urges Donetsk residents not to leave their homes and not to use public transport.”

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Klitschko reminded Baerbock that Ukraine surrendered the nuclear weapons that it had inherited through the collapse of the Soviet Union in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the U.S., France, and the United Kingdom.

“But right now, this critical situation, we [face] one of the strongest army in the world,” he said, referring to the Russian forces. “And every aggressor who just think to attack Ukraine have to understand: They have to pay painful price. We’re ready to fight. We’re ready to defend our families, our states, our cities, our citizens.”