Category Archives: Germany

How worried should Europe be as Russia starts cutting off gas supplies?

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Analysis: Putin is determined to use resource as a weapon, as shown in move to cut off Poland and Bulgaria

The unavoidable truth looming over Europe’s response to the invasion of Ukraine is that Russian gas heats the continent’s homes and powers its industries.

While European leaders have vowed to wean themselves off Kremlin-controlled supplies, both of gas and oil, the reality is that this is very hard to do in short order. There will be at least one more cold winter to come before major energy-hungry economies that rely heavily on Russia, such as Germany and Italy, can tap other sources.

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Klaus Schulze, German electronic music pioneer, dies aged 74

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Multi-instrumentalist who played with Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel before admired solo career is hailed for his ‘innovative spirit’

Klaus Schulze, the German multi-instrumentalist whose work with drones, pulses and synthesisers was hugely influential on generations of electronic music makers, has died aged 74.

Frank Uhle, managing director of Schulze’s label SVP, wrote: “We lose and will miss a good personal friend – one of the most influential and important composers of electronic music – a man of conviction and an exceptional artist. Our thoughts in this hour are with his wife, sons and family. His always cheerful nature, his innovative spirit and his impressive body of work remain indelibly rooted in our memories.”

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Germany’s SPD calls on Gerhard Schröder to quit party over Russia links

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Former chancellor says he has no intention of resigning his seats on boards of Russian energy firms

The co-leader of Germany’s Social Democratic party (SPD) has urged the former chancellor Gerhard Schröder to hand in his party membership after he made clear in an interview that he had no intention to resign from his seats on the boards of Russian energy companies over the war in Ukraine.

Schröder, who was Germany’s head of government from 1998 to 2005, presides over the board of the Russian oil company Rosneft and is chairman of the shareholder committee of pipeline company Nord Stream.

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Madeleine McCann: Portuguese authorities declare man formal suspect

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German police had previously said Christian Brueckner, 44, was probably responsible for toddler’s disappearance in 2007

A German man has been formally identified as a suspect in the disappearance of British toddler Madeleine McCann 15 years ago, Portuguese prosecutors have said.

Christian Brueckner, a convicted rapist, has been made an “arguido”, translated as “named suspect” or “formal suspect” who is treated by Portuguese police as more than a witness but has not been arrested or charged.

The German’s lawyer said that his client has not been charged over the case.

Prosecutors in Faro did not publicly name the man but said in a statement he was identified as a suspect by German authorities at their request.

The timing of the move could be related to Portugal’s 15-year statute of limitations for crimes with a maximum prison sentence of 10 years or more. Madeleine disappeared on 3 May 2007, while on holiday with her parents in Praia da Luz in Portugal.

It is the first time that Portuguese prosecutors have identified an official suspect in the case since Kate and Gerry McCann, Madeleine’s parents, were named suspects in 2007. They were later cleared.

Prosecutors said the investigation has been carried out with cooperation from British and German authorities.

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EU chief urges member states to give Ukraine weapons quickly

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Ursula von der Leyen says she doesn’t distinguish between heavy and light arms and suggests Sberbank could face sanctions

The president of the European Commission has urged member states to supply Ukraine with weapons systems “quickly” and suggested that a next round of EU sanctions could target Russia’s powerful Sberbank and include an embargo on Russian oil.

“It applies to all member states: those who can should deliver quickly, because only that way Ukraine can survive in its acute defensive battle against Russia,” Ursula von der Leyen told Germany’s Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

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Ukraine snubs German president over past ‘close ties to Russia’

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Volodymyr Zelenskiy rejects request by Frank-Walter Steinmeier for meeting in Kyiv, Bild reports

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has rejected a request by the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to visit Kyiv along with other European politicians on Wednesday.

Steinmeier, a former foreign minister and erstwhile ally of the ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder, is on a state visit in Poland, where he is discussing the implications of the Russian war in Ukraine with his Polish counterpart, Andrzej Duda.

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‘Firms will go bust’: Germany prepares for a future without Russian gas

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Germany is bracing for supplies to be cut by Moscow in retaliation for sanctions or as part of an energy embargo

In Germany, they call it “Day X”. Businesses up and down the land are making contingency plans for what is seen as a growing likelihood that Russian gas will stop flowing into Europe’s biggest economy.

“It would be a disaster – one which would have seemed almost unthinkable just two months ago, but which right now feels like a very realistic prospect,” the owner of a hi-tech mechanical engineering company in western Germany said. The firm produces everything from battery cases for electric cars to train clutch systems.

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Germany will stop importing Russian gas ‘very soon’, says Olaf Scholz

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Chancellor declines to endorse claim by Boris Johnson during London visit that goal will be achieved by mid-2024

The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has said his country is doing all it can to wean itself off Russian energy, but declined to endorse a claim by Boris Johnson that it would stop importing Russian gas by the middle of 2024.

Scholz said only that the goal would be achieved very soon, and that Germany would stop using Russian coal by the summer and Russian oil by the end of the year.

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Germany’s Watergate: 1950s chancellor used spy agency to infiltrate rival party

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Covert flow of information from BND enabled Konrad Adenauer to cement his hold on power, historians reveal

Germany’s first democratically elected chancellor used the country’s foreign intelligence service to systematically spy on his biggest political rivals for almost a decade, a group of independent historians tasked with researching the formerly West German spy agency’s history have discovered.

The covert and illegal flow of information between the offices of Konrad Adenauer and the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) chief, Reinhard Gehlen, enabled the conservative politician to cement his hold on power through accurate insider knowledge on the campaign strategies, parliamentary manoeuvres and internal power struggles of the Social Democratic party (SPD), which led the opposition in the Bundestag at the time.

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Woman who drew up Schindler’s lists during Holocaust dies at 107

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Mimi Reinhardt was in charge of compiling names of Jews to work in German industrialist’s factory

The woman who drew up lists of people for the German industrialist Oskar Schindler that helped save hundreds of Jews during the Holocaust has died aged 107.

Mimi Reinhardt, who was employed as Schindler’s secretary, was in charge of drawing up the lists of Jewish workers from the ghetto of the Polish city of Kraków who were recruited to work at his factory, saving them from deportation to Nazi death camps.

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Putin’s daughters targeted in US sanctions against Russia

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Joe Biden links new measures directly to accounts of atrocities committed by Russian forces in Bucha

The US has announced a new round of sanctions targeting Russia’s top public and private banks and two daughters of Vladimir Putin, following mounting global accusations of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

The sanctions targeted Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova, two adult daughters of Putin’s with his former wife Lyudmila Shkrebneva.

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The bodies of Bucha have set a difficult test for the west

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Analysis: From Ukraine’s point of view, this has to be the time to pile pressure on Germany in particular

Sometimes a war crime is so egregious, and so fully reported, that it cannot but stir the conscience of the west. The My Lai massacre in 1968, Srebrenica in 1995, the British suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, the Rwanda genocide of 1994, the Disappeared of Argentina under the junta in the 1980s or even the dispatches about bodies piled high in Bulgarian town squares by the US war reporter Januarius MacGahan in 1876 were all moments when the defence of ignorance has to be abandoned.

Even then the truth is more complicated and the west did not always act. Bill Clinton regretted he did not respond to the murders of Tutsis in 1994, saying he did not “fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which [Rwandans] were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror”. Srebrenica was arguably only the culmination of ethnic cleansing that had been going on for three years. My Lai, revealed two years after the event, only provided further momentum to a pre-existing US anti-war movement. The scale of the British repression of the Mau Mau rebellion was only truly documented decades afterwards by a Harvard historian Caroline Elkins in her book Britain’s Gulag.

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Killing of civilians in Bucha and Kyiv condemned as ‘terrible war crime’

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Europe pledges further sanctions against Russia after reports of killing of scores of unarmed Ukrainians

Russia stands accused of “terrible” war crimes, as western leaders condemned the killings of unarmed civilians in Bucha and the surrounding areas of Kyiv in alleged atrocities that prompted fresh demands for tougher action against Moscow.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said the Kremlin-ordered attack on his country amounted to genocide, after local officials reported scores of civilians had been killed in the towns of Bucha, Irpin and Hostomel near the capital following the withdrawal of Russian forces.

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UN donor conference falls billions short of $4.4bn target to help Afghanistan

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Conference raises only $2.44bn as Russian foreign minister says west is responsible for country’s humanitarian crisis

The world’s donor drought, and growing global divisions over Afghanistan’s political direction, have been laid bare when a UN appeal for $4.4bn (£3.35bn) to help Afghanistan fell massively short, the second UN donor conference in a month to do so.

Donor countries pledged only $2.44bn towards the appeal, a senior UN official said on Thursday after a high-level pledging conference.

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Olaf Scholz’s SPD secures major win in Saarland state election

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Rare absolute majority suggests there may be more to centre-left’s revival than good fortune

The German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left party has passed its first electoral test since entering government, after the Social Democratic party secured a rare absolute majority at Saarland state elections.

Led by Anke Rehlinger, a trained lawyer and former shot putter, the SPD won 43.5% of Sunday’s vote in the small state on the French border.

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Berlin Krautrock exhibition celebrates groundbreaking genre

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Posters of Kraftwerk, Neu! and Can span movement’s roots in the counterculture scene of 1968

A motley train of shaggy-haired musicians is gliding into the future on a hastily sketched highway, brandishing bongos, vegetables and flaming guitars.

The poster for a 1971 gig by German-English-Swiss trio Brainticket, on display at Berlin’s small Bröhan Museum until 24 April, visually sums up the essence of a German musical movement so forward-looking at its height, its country of origin is only now starting to recognise its legacy.

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Germany agrees gas deal with Qatar to help end dependency on Russia

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Long-term contract will not immediately stop flow of money to Russia, for which German ministers have been criticised

Germany has agreed a contract with Qatar for the supply of liquefied natural gas (LNG) that will help the European country wean itself off its dependency on Russian energy.

But the contract is a long-term solution and will do little to slow the current flow of European money into Russian coffers, estimated to be worth $285m (£217m) a day for oil alone.

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Russia-Ukraine war: what we know on day 23 of the invasion

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Food supply fears as Biden plans to warn Chinese president against providing military support for Russia

Russia’s bombardment in the east of Ukraine continued on Friday. In the streets of Mariupol, where 350,000 civilians have been stranded with little food or water, Russia’s armed forces were “tightening the noose” around the city, a spokesperson for the Russian defence ministry said. In the eastern city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s state emergency service said a multistorey teaching building had been shelled on Friday morning, killing one person, wounding 11 and trapping one other in the rubble.

Russian missiles struck an aircraft repair plant in Ukraine’s western city of Lviv, 50 miles from the border with Poland and a safe haven for hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Ukrainians. Blasts were heard at about 6am on Friday, preceded by the sound of air raid sirens, and a mushroom-shaped plume of smoke could be seen rising in the sky.

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‘We must welcome them’: how Europe is helping Ukrainian refugees

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Unlike the UK, EU countries have offered open sanctuary to the millions fleeing Russia’s attack in biggest refugee crisis since second world war

Over the past few days, images of desperate Ukrainian families being turned away by officials have thrown the UK’s response to what has been termed the biggest refugee crisis since the second world war into stark contrast with its European neighbours.

So far the UK has refused to match the EU’s decision to offer Ukrainians open sanctuary, instead operating a limited family reunification and humanitarian sponsorship system.

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Iran nuclear talks rocked by Russian demand for sanctions exemption

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Moscow seeks guarantees regarding trade with Iran that would undermine west’s response to Ukraine invasion

Russia has been accused of trying to take the Iran nuclear deal hostage as part of its wider battle with the west over Ukraine, after it threw a last-minute spanner into plans for an agreement to lift a swathe of US economic sanctions on Tehran.

After months of negotiations in Vienna, a revised deal was expected to be reached within days under which US sanctions would be lifted in return for Tehran returning to full compliance with the 2015 nuclear nonproliferation deal.

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