Germany’s foreign minister said yesterday the “unspeakable” row between US President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House resembled a “bad dream”, as Kyiv’s European allies rallied to its side.
“Yesterday evening underlined that a new age of infamy has begun,” Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in a televised statement.
“Many of you will have slept uneasily after seeing the unspeakable videos from the White House,” she said, adding: “Honestly, I did too.”
“Sadly this was not a bad dream, but a heavy reality,” she said.
She rejected “switching… the roles of victim and aggressor” in the conflict, an allusion to Trump’s comments that Zelensky was “gambling with World War III”.
She also urged that both Germany and the European Union loosen their budget rules to facilitate support for Ukraine following the row, which ended with Zelensky being thrown out of the White House, according to US media.
She said she would “wholeheartedly push for more flexibility in the (EU) Stability and Growth Pact” as well as a “fundamental reform of the debt brake” anchored in Germany’s constitution, in order to enable more help for Kyiv. Baerbock also called on Germany’s centrist parties to “approve the three-billion-euro aid package for Ukraine” which is waiting for parliamentary sign-off.
Germany is currently in a transition phase following the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s unwieldy three-way coalition government in November and its subsequent heavy defeat in a general election last week.
But the current parliament is still able to take decisions until new MPs are installed at the end of this month.
Baerbock, whose Green party will almost certainly not be represented in the new government, said that next Thursday’s meeting of EU heads of government should be used to bring forward “a comprehensive financing package for Ukraine, for humanitarian, economic and most of all for defence support”. She said such measures could help “Ukraine withstand Russia’s aggression, even if the US withdraws support, so that it can achieve a just peace and not a capitulation”.
Ukraine’s defeat could mean “Putin’s troops in the Baltics next, or even directly at the gates of our neighbour, Poland”, she added.
Germany’s main traditional parties, the centre-right CDU/CSU and centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), are in the exploratory stage of talks on a new government. But Baerbock warned: “We have no time to lose.”
“We cannot wait for the formation of a new government at the national level, the situation is serious,” she said.
Germany’s likely next chancellor, CDU/CSU leader Friedrich Merz, a fervent supporter of Ukraine, has said he wants a new government in place by Easter.
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