I watched the WDR documentary "Ukraine - Hilfe für ein versehrtes Land" (Ukraine - Help for a Scarred Country). It features the Berlin-based relief organization "Life Bridge Ukraine", founded by Janine von Wolfersdorff. Anyone with a heart watching this report will be moved to tears. You see 24-year-old Zhenya, who lost both legs and a forearm, fighting his way back to life through numerous surgeries. Or Vitalii Saiko-Kazakow, also a bilateral leg amputee, who, thanks to his prosthetics and hard work, is now able to play football with his son again. Another soldier, a former industrial climber, insisted despite his amputations that he had to return to the front to help his army.
The organization doesn't stop at initial medical care in Berlin; it also trains young Ukrainian professionals like 22-year-old physiotherapist Anastasiia Tkach. The goal is empowering self-reliance. By autumn 2025, a former "garbage dump" in the basement of Kyiv's Hospital No. 12 had been transformed into a state-of-the-art prosthetics workshop. It shows an incredible will to survive in a scarred country. I, too, have a close friend whom I've known personally since 1999—an officer serving on the front lines since March 2022, while his wife and daughter have found refuge in Chemnitz.
Fortunately, Germany continues to support Ukraine in its fight against the aggressor, but I ask myself: where were all these supporters back when Chancellor Gerhard Schröder invited one of the worst war criminals of our time to speak in the Bundestag and hailed him as a "crystal-clear democrat"?
Anyone with half a brain knew from the start what kind of man Putin was. As soon as he came to power, he had Chechnya bombed, flattened Grozny, and committed horrific war crimes. One of the first journalists to expose this—Anna Politkovskaya—was murdered on his orders. It bears the undeniable signature of the KGB, standing in direct continuity with the Cheka, the NKVD, the Red Terror, Stalinist purges at the Lubyanka, and the Tsarist secret police. Putin grew up in this exact apparatus, and in this tradition he systematically eliminated his opposition: from Politkovskaya to Litvinenko, Nemtsov, and Navalny.
And what did Germany do during all those decades? We celebrated Putin as long as the money rolled in and cheap gas flowed. Major corporations made massive profits and dictated political strategy. Even Angela Merkel, considered personally uncorruptible, pushed through the Nord Stream 2 project, even though it was blatantly obvious that it served to subjugate Ukraine, bypass Poland, and once again divide Europe between Germany and Russia.
It is primitive, tragic, and deeply shameful. Sometimes I feel ashamed to be German because we have learned absolutely nothing from our own history. Human rights and peace were tossed aside as long as corporate profits kept soaring. Our historical responsibility would have been to stop this war criminal in his tracks early on. Instead, even now—five years after the full-scale invasion began—we still look away far too often while hundreds die every single day and night. It is a tragic failure on every level.
