SPD boss
Klingbeil: Don’t leave Putin sovereignty over May 8th
SPD leader Lars Klingbeil admitted that mistakes have been made in dealing with Russia in the past. Photo: Christophe Gateau/dpa
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The SPD leader admits mistakes in dealing with Russia and warns against letting Putin interpret the historically significant May 8th. Russia must not falsify history, said Klingbeil.
SPD leader Lars Klingbeil has warned against giving Russian President Vladimir Putin the authority to interpret May 8th.
“We must not allow Russia to falsify history. And we must not allow Putin to try to interpret this May 8, but also the war,” he said, referring to the Russian attack on Ukraine. It was therefore right that Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) made it clear in his television speech “why we are standing by the courageous Ukrainians these days, these weeks and why we are helping them”.
In Russia, Victory Day over Nazism will be celebrated this Monday with a military parade and a speech by Putin. He justified the attack on Ukraine with the accusation that he wanted to liberate the country from Nazism – but there is no solid evidence for the accusation.
“We should have turned earlier”
At the same time, Klingbeil admitted that mistakes had been made in dealings with Russia in the past. “We have always had a political and social consensus in this country that we want to be close to Russia,” he said on the Phoenix broadcaster. “We made a mistake there. We should have turned earlier,” he said. Klingbeil recalled the Russian annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014, the attempted assassination of Russian opposition figure Alexej Navalny and the murder of an anti-Russian Chechnya fighter in Berlin. “These were all signs that we should have dealt with Russia differently politically.”
Conclusions must be drawn from these mistakes, and not only with regard to Russia. “If it’s about dealing with China, for example, then we have to act differently today and be more critical,” said Klingbeil.