it’s not about Crimea anymore. It is no longer about the Donbass. It’s all about Ukraine. And at some point it’s about Georgia and other states that were once part of the Soviet Union that lives on today in the form of monuments, mausoleums and infatuation with Vladimir Putin. It seems as if the Russian President, who is setting the House of World Order on fire, wants to heed an old Stalin saying that it takes more courage in your own army to retreat than to advance.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has already announced a partial mobilization of reservists. US President Joe Biden speaks logically of the “beginning of an invasion” and – in convoy with Great Britain and the European Union – issues tough sanctions. They are directed against two major banks, the trade in Russian government bonds and Putin’s aides and their families. It was not possible to find out whether multi-supervisory board member Gerhard Schröder was also meant.
“The Putin model is growing,” is the conclusion drawn by the Bertelsmann Foundation. According to its own “Transformation Index”, for the first time since 2004 there are more autocratic regimes than democratic states in the world. Russian aggression challenges deeper evaluations:
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Putin’s attack clearly shows us that the “peace dividend from the end of the Cold War has finally been used up,” writes economist Michael Hüther in the Handelsblatt guest commentary.
Putin’s tank parade in the open field is a setback for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s diplomatic efforts. “I’m disappointed, but not unprepared,” he said last night on ARD. The Social Democrat had previously stopped a project he had once dismissed as a “private-sector project”: the commissioning of the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea natural gas pipeline. He also called on Robert Habeck’s Federal Ministry of Economics to reassess the security of supply.
The former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who emerged from obscurity, did this work himself for obvious reasons and threatened higher energy prices: “Well then, welcome to a new world in which Europeans will soon be paying 2,000 euros for 1,000 cubic meters of gas.”
Scholz can console himself for such gorilla gestures with the fact that spring is about to begin and great encouragement from the western camp. Julianne Smith, US Ambassador to NATO, tells our editorial team: “Germany has done the right thing.” We analyze the overall situation over eight pages.
In the midst of the noise of the political battles, it seemed quite strange last night to be confronted with the quite obtrusive advertising of the state monopolist Gazprom on the TV screen at the Champions League games. Putin’s best economic weapon system has bought millions into the advertising pool of the football association Uefa.
A number of MEPs are now calling on officials not to hold the Champions League final on May 28 in Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg as planned. “No chance of holding football tournaments in a Russia that invades sovereign states,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson ranted in London. In Germany, second division soccer team FC Schalke 04 is worried about the political situation in Eastern Europeas is officially declared – but probably even more so because of Gazprom’s annual gift of ten million euros.
On the Bavarian regional stage, even Chancellor Markus Söder, who was unable to attend, was caught up in the Ukraine drama. The CSU leader and prime minister is being held up against the warnings about sanctions against Russia that he left in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine” just a month ago. Sanctions would have little effect and would “often harm us just as much,” it said. With a Nord Stream 2 stop, it could be “very cold and very expensive” for Germany.
Politically, it has already become quite cold for him at home, the polls have frozen at an all-time low. And so the powerhouse of the Christian Socialists is looking for liberation this morning with a major cabinet reshuffle. One of the most blossoming speculations is that his prompter Markus Blume will become Minister of Science and that the General Secretariat, which will then become vacant, will take on the publicity-savvy Dorothee Bär.
“History is being made, things are moving forward,” says the band’s most famous song, Fehlfarben. But sometimes progress is made because history is corrected. Just like now with the planned IPO of Stuttgart-based Porsche AG and its iconic vehicles. With the maneuver, the entrepreneurial families of Wolfgang Porsche, 78, and Hans Michel Piëch, 80, regain access to their beloved ones.
As a reminder: They once lost sole control to the Wolfsburg-based VW Group in takeover battles instigated by the intoxicated ex-CEO Wendelin Wiedeking. The Porsche clan is also significantly involved there, but they would clearly dominate in Stuttgart in the future. A right of first refusal is planned for the maximum 30 percent of Porsche shares that are sold on the stock exchange.
And, who knows: In the end, the home of the legendary 911 could be worth around 100 billion euros as much as the entire twelve-brand group VW.
And then there’s the woman who calls herself “Crocodile of Wall Street” and “Razzlekhan.”, raps, invests in start-ups, provides business magazines with columns or distributes business tips on her own TikTok channel: Heather Morgan, 31 years old. In the meantime, the steep career in the digital age has been interrupted: she and her husband Ilya Lichtenstein are in prison. The FBI found $3.6 billion worth of bitcoins on the couple. They are said to come from the six-year-old cyber robbery on a cryptocurrency trading platform.
Apparently, the “Bonnie and Clyde 2.0” duo tried to disguise the origin of the money with shell companies and fake identities, but saved important information in a single cloud file. This crocodile has no more teeth.
I wish you a productive day showing bite.
It greets you cordially
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs
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