comment by
Joachim Kaeppner
When Napoleon’s decimated “Grande Armée” dragged itself back from Russia through ice and snow in 1812, a German folk song was devoted to this epic defeat: “With man and horse and wagon, / so God has beaten them! / Hunter without a rifle, / Kaiser without an army. / An army without an emperor, / A wilderness without a sage.” A great many people in the West, and certainly in Ukraine, would like to see a similar end to Putin’s murderous campaign against Ukraine, apart from people like Sahra Wagenknecht, who talk about peace but talk about the horror of the rapes in spooky talk shows downplaying of Ukrainian women by Russian soldiers. One may be reminded of the old poem by the terrible defeats and losses of the Russian army, which, after all, was completely indifferent to its own soldiers. And an army without an emperor, that would be the best outcome of the Ukraine war in Western eyes, i.e. a fall of the warmonger in the Kremlin (Napoleon, however, retreated to safe Paris and held out for some time).