German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll, 20/14,
p. 885.
Frau President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.
Let us together take a time trip to the year 1962: At that
time, the American President Kennedy threatened the Soviet Union with a third
world war should it station atomic weapons in Cuba – practically at the front
door of the U.S.A. If you ask me, he was right to do that. Why did he do that? The
security interests of the United States were massively threatened.
Let us go a good thirty years further, to the year 1999:
Poland, Czechia and Hungary joined NATO. A few years later, 2004 to 2007,
followed Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Roumania.
Alexander Lambsdorff (FDP): Because their security interests were threatened.
Let us for once consider the relation between the Russian
Federation and the Ukraine; in the post-Soviet time, it is shaped by
skirmishing over gas and the Crimea. Let us speak of the Crimea. For 180 years,
it was Russian; it was russified after it had been conquered from the Ottomans.
In 1954, Khrushchev, by an administrative act – it was then about the
construction of a railway – attached the Crimea to the Ukraine. Since then, the
Crimea twice sought to return to Russia: In 1994, and lately in 2014 in a
referendum in which almost 97 percent of the population of Crimea voted for
annexation to Russia. International law provided various possibilities of
evaluation; yet in that regard, our Foreign Minister will likely be able to say
a bit more.
What alarms me is this propaganda against Russia, indeed in
the media, in politics and before all things in this sovereign house, in the Bundestag.
We need only to have listened to our previous speakers so as to notice that here
an unspeakable rhetoric deals with threatening scenarios of war and the
suspension of gas deliveries. On this front [Horn] also pushes the ambassador of Ukraine, Melnyk, who today is a
guest in this house. I am happy, Herr Melnyk, that I can also thus say to you:
The demand for weapons we Germans cannot fulfill, and your unspeakable
war-mongering I can only condemn. You insult Germany, you draw unworthy comparisons
with German history, with national socialism. Frau Baerbock, under your
predecessors such an ambassador would have been called in and a state secretary
would have conducted a very protracted conversation with him.
Yet there are also other tones. Vice Admiral Schönbach
recently stated that Russia wants eye-to-eye respect and also deserves it, that
war is absolute nonsense, that the Crimea is gone and would never again return.
I say to you, ladies and gentlemen: This officer is not only right, he has
pluck.
To whose use is this escalation on the border in the
Ukraine, cui bono? The U.S.A. uses
the Nord Stream 2 pipeline as a means of pressure. Germany should sacrifice its
own interests for foreign interests. We may look at the 2014 EU sanctions for
which the U.S.A. quite ably clamored. Those suffering are primarily Russia with
a business loss of 36 billion U.S. dollars, followed by Germany – a disparity
beyond all other European states together – with 23 billion U.S. dollars. With
these sanctions, we carve our own flesh and this must stop.
The U.S. economy besides in this same time frame has made a
gain in this business. A conclusion to this is needed. The Ukraine requires a
solution, a solution which considers on one side the interests of the Ukraine
yet also on the other side the security interests of the Russian Federation as
well. We have just heard it, and here I grant you are right: There is to be no
peace without Russia. Allow me to draw one conclusion. There is no war, no war
threatens. No gas shortage threatens. We need to take seriously the security
interests of Russia since this also suits world peace.
Many thanks, ladies and gentlemen.
[trans: tem]
