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How Habeck, Baerbock and Co. experienced the outbreak of war in the Ukraine

How Habeck, Baerbock and Co. experienced the outbreak of war in the Ukraine

The star records the turning point proclaimed by Olaf Scholz. German politicians and security experts tell how they experienced the beginning of the war. Here is an excerpt. Read along for the entire story star Plus.

For the first time, leading politicians from the traffic light coalition report very personally on how they experienced the days before and after the Russian attack on Ukraine a year ago. “You don’t get to think about the dimensions of what’s happening. The most important thing is to work, not to overlook anything, no matter when,” said Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD). star. “Life is changing completely. Almost all appointments in the calendar: canceled. Everything is based on the war. I was in the meetings and switching of our crisis team every morning from day one, for months, every day.” She explained to her then seven-year-old son “what war means for people, that it means that a lot of people are very badly off and some of them flee to us in Germany.”

Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) described this staras he was informed of the impending outbreak of war on the eve of the invasion: “In the early evening I had a visitor from the US embassy at the ministry. I received a dossier that said: It will happen tonight. The blood bags are being thawed, the Rocket launchers are loaded, the vehicles are marked, and the troops are clearly moving towards the border. It was clear: war is coming, it will become a bitter reality.”

Annalena Baerbock: “Please don’t”

Federal Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock can still clearly remember the morning of February 24, 2022, when she found out about Russia’s attack on Ukraine. “It took a moment before I classified the vibration of the phone as real. At 4.51 a.m. the first explosions were reported in Kiev. At 4.59 a.m. my office manager was on the phone. I said: please don’t,” says Baerbock in a documentation of the star, in which numerous top German politicians and security experts report on the beginning of the war from their personal perspective. Baerbock continued that it was always clear that the war could begin. “But when it happens, it still takes your breath away.” She then got dressed and went to the Foreign Office.

Numerous phone calls and conferences followed throughout the day. In the afternoon, Baerbock had the first opportunity to call her Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba. “We had often met in the weeks before, spoken even more often. In such moments, of course, you think that he also has children,” says Baerbock in the star. A day later, Kuleba was also connected to the special meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels via video. “He thanked us for taking the time,” Baerbock recalls. “I just thought, how surreal. We’re sitting here warm and safe in Brussels, he’s in a basement in Kiev, secured with sandbags. And he said: thank you.” The hardest part for her, given the threat Kuleba was exposed to, was saying goodbye at the end of the conversation, says Baerbock. “What do you say? Goodbye? Goodbye? All the best? Suddenly saying goodbye has a whole different meaning.”

Chancellery Minister Wolfgang Schmidt speaks of a checklist

Chancellery Minister Wolfgang Schmidt said that star, based on intelligence findings, there was “a kind of checklist for the observation and analysis of Russian activities” before the attack. “What elements do you really need to be able to start an invasion? At some point everything on this list was ticked off, right down to the much-cited blood bags,” said the SPD politician. “The question was: will Putin do it, or will he do it it not? Is that just a threat or not?”

The weekend before the war began, the unanimous opinion at the Munich Security Conference was that he wouldn’t do it. According to Schmidt, many participants said: “An attack doesn’t make any sense, Putin won’t be able to take and occupy Ukraine, even 150,000 soldiers aren’t enough for that. Zelenskyy said in his speech on Saturday: There will be no invasion .”

Lars Klingbeil: “Didn’t think Putin would really attack”

The SPD chairman Lars Klingbeil confessed to the star: “I didn’t think that Putin would really attack. I always believed that could still be avoided. That made the realization on February 24 all the harder.” Klingbeil: “I woke up in the morning and had the message on my cell phone: war had broken out. I was shaped by 9/11 when I lived in New York, where it quickly became clear: something very, very big is happening here, it’s going to be shape our lives. That was also the case that morning, the awareness: It’s a tectonic moment, it’s shifting everything, it won’t be over in two weeks either.”

Source: Stern

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