Good morning dear readers,
many are fleeing Ukraine, already three million inhabitants who do not want to see their country as a battlefield. But three arrived by train in bombed Kyiv, which has imposed a 35-hour curfew since last night. They are three emissaries of freedom and the European Union: Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala and his Slovenian counterpart Janez Jansa.
Talks are planned with Ukrainian President Volodomir Zelensky, who promptly said that Ukraine can only win with such friends. Morawiecki, whose country wants a “NATO peacekeeping mission”, wrote on Twitter: “Here, in war-torn Kyiv, history is being made.” The EU supports Ukraine, “we brought this message to Kyiv today”.
It shouldn’t be like Karl Kraus’s “The Last Days of Mankind”: “I have written a tragedy whose perishing hero is mankind.”
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Tomorrow, Thursday, the Ukrainian President Zelensky will address the servants of the people in the German Bundestag via video address directly from Kyiv. The traffic light coalition denied the wish of the Union faction to talk longer about the war and its consequences after the speech. One could have fathomed why for years the plight of a country in which the Wehrmacht and SS raged like no other region was denied. One could have debated what constitutes responsibility now that the whole Gazprom swindle has been exposed.
As a Basta politician, Gerhard Schröder once again draws attention to himself: He “irrevocably” returned the honorary citizenship of the city of Hanover. The municipality had dared to demand that the Social Democrats and state-owned company board of directors (Rosneft, Nord Stream, soon Gazprom) distance themselves from Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, Ukraine was disappointed by the former chancellor’s recent trip to Moscow, where he met Putin and a high-ranking adviser. That was a “PR appointment by Schröder at our expense,” quoted “Bild” from an anonymous source from Selenski’s environment.
It also got through that Schröder also met the oligarch Roman Abramovich – a few days before the Russian, who had become known with his club FC Chelsea, got into very difficult weather.
A secret dossier from Russian prosecutors was leaked to the BBC about Abramovich. There is a reasonably detailed explanation of how the oligarch became the owner of the Sibneft oil company in 1995 thanks to corruption and finally in 2002, during the Putin era, apparently also swindled the Slavneft oil company. The head of the delegation from the Chinese group CNPC, which offered twice as much, was kidnapped after landing in Moscow.
After Great Britain, the European Union also imposed sanctions on the nabob and other Russian billionaires and froze assets. Abramovich, who has apparently fled to Moscow, has already lost his “trophy asset” Chelsea FC. Although the oligarch has Russian and Israeli citizenship as well as Portuguese citizenship, Lisbon is currently investigating whether everything went right with his naturalization. Abramowitsch is better off staying in Russia, where ex-Wirecard board member Jan Marsalek may be a good contact for financial flows of all kinds.
(Photo: Screenshot)
Marina Ovsjannikova was sentenced unusually leniently for current Russian conditions. She had protested against the military strike in Ukraine with an anti-war poster live on a TV news program. A court in Moscow only sentenced the 44-year-old mother of two to a fine of 30,000 rubles (about 226 euros). In the courtroom, she said, “I do not admit my guilt. I am convinced that Russia is committing a crime.”
Russia is “the aggressor in Ukraine”. It is possible that the TV employee will be punished under the new Russian media law, which provides for up to 15 years in prison for spreading “fake news”. As is well known, Putin’s soldiers do not take part in a “war”, but in a “special operation”.
If you look at the deformed Russian constitutional state, Leo Tolstoy comes to mind: “Some people walk through the forest and see nothing there but firewood.”
Anyone who was anyone in the auto industry a few years ago showed up at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January. Go digital! Today it has to be Austin’s hip South by Southwest (SXSW) in March, once a cuddle get-together for lovers of music, the interactive and the film. And that in a liberal hotspot in the middle of the ultra-conservative oil and rodeo state of Texas. This is where Herbert Diess, head of Germany’s largest industrial group Volkswagen, set an example.
Annoyed by the setbacks in increasingly narcissistic China and horrified by the killings in Ukraine, the manager referred to his future markets: electromobility, networked cars, data-controlled (autonomous) driving and… yes, actually the USA. There, where “Dieselgate” began in 2015 and the VW image is no longer that of a clean German engineering group. In the Handelsblatt interview, the CEO says about…
- …the Ukraine war: “It’s a human drama that touches us all deeply. What worries me is that we don’t see a European negotiator speaking on an equal footing with President Putin. Much is at stake for Europe and Germany. The problems in the energy supply, in the supply chains and the dramatic price increases are a foretaste.”
- …a geographical reorientation: “We have to position ourselves even more broadly worldwide. China and the USA remain the major mobility growth regions. Overall, we’re still far too small in the United States. We need a significantly higher market share to play a real role. We are currently at four percent. We aim for ten percent.”
- …Data: “Tesla is the only car manufacturer to continuously evaluate thousands of difficult situations, such as those involving pedestrians or wheelchair users, and use them to train its own systems. So far we have not been able to upload and evaluate critical driving situations. Neither do our competitors, by the way. But this will change. We are already improving our map material with driving data.”
When Herbert Diess returns to Wolfsburg, he will take a look at the results of this week’s works council elections. The previous top employee representative Daniela Cavallo, at times a tough Diess opponent, is so much a favorite despite new competitors that she would not have needed the help of the local SPD member of the Bundestag, Falko Mohrs.
And then there is the People’s Republic of China, whose new corona outbreak puzzles the world even more than Beijing’s love or dislove of Vladimir Putin. In any case, 37 million inhabitants are in lockdown in a country that has set “Zero Covid” as its maxim. People in the big tech city of Shenzhen, but also in Changchun, Jilin City, Dongguan and Langfang, have to stay at home. With more than 5,100, the number of new infections on Tuesday was higher than when the virus broke out in Wuhan in early 2020.
The dose of hope, without which such wake-up call topics are essential, comes from Henri Matisse: “There are flowers everywhere for those who want to see them.”
I wish you a flowery day.
It greets you cordially
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs
PS: Despite rising incidence values, most of the corona rules could be abolished on March 20th. We are interested in your opinion: Which easing do you currently think is justifiable – and which ones are premature? What is your position on an extension of the corona restrictions? What about the mask, what about the obligation to test? Is it enough if the federal states decide in future which protective measures should apply in hotspots? Write us your opinion in five sentences [email protected]. We will publish selected articles with attribution on Thursday in print and online.
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