"Hotsy-Totsy, another Nazi: Friedrich Merz proposes joint production of Taurus with Kiev"
Gilbert Doctorow (May 29, 2025)
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2025/05/29/hotsy-totsy-another-nazi-friedrich-merz-proposes-joint-production-of-taurus-with-kiev/

On 15 February 2022, at his joint news conference with Vladimir Putin which concluded his visit to Moscow, former German chancellor Olaf Scholz called ‘risible’ the Russian leader’s denunciation of the Kiev regime as neo-Nazi run. How could a nation led by a Jew, Zelensky, behave in a Nazi manner, he asked with sarcasm. In saying this, Scholz discredited himself to the Russians once and for all. He also surely contributed to Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch the Special Military Operation on the 24th by demonstrating that it was hopeless to find a diplomatic solution to the East-West confrontation since basic assumptions were too far apart.

To his credit, in the three years of warfare in and over Ukraine that followed Scholz had sufficient discipline and fear of overly antagonizing the neighbor to the East which compelled him to ignore the warlike pronouncements of his Foreign Minister from the Greens Analena Baerbock and his popular Defense Minister Pistorius. He refused to allow the shipment of Germany’s Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine lest this directly involve Germany in the war, leading to unpredictable but ominous Russian retaliation.

During his electoral campaign last fall, Scholz’s successor, Christian Democrat leader Friedrich Merz chose instead to light the fires of German revanchism to bolster voter support. He advocated the delivery of the Taurus to Kiev. Not only that, but he precisely recommended it be used to destroy Russia’s landmark Kerch bridge connecting the Crimean peninsula with mainland Russia, thereby inflicting a humiliation of enormous proportions on the Kremlin.

In the early weeks of his chancellorship, Merz was prevented from openly handing over Taurus to the Ukrainians by his coalition partners, the Social Democrats, who insisted on abiding by Scholz’s ruling. However, we see from the Chancellor’s meeting with Zelensky yesterday for consultations on further military assistance to Ukraine, that Merz has chosen to have his way by crook if not by hook. Their joint declaration speaks of technical cooperation enabling Kiev to manufacture precision long range missiles for the purpose of striking military bases deep inside the Russian Federation.

The formula advanced by Merz and Zelensky leaves it unclear exactly where the future production facility would be situated, but it is a safe guess to say that it would be inside Germany, because anything built within Ukraine would surely be destroyed by Russia’s Oreshniks before it produced the very first products. Merz is gambling on the notion that Russia will not dare strike Germany due to its protection under Article 5 of the NATO treaty.

In doing this, Merz is willfully ignoring the unmistakable remarks of Vladimir Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that Germany’s participation in sending Taurus missiles against the Russian Federation makes it a co-belligerent and that Russian retaliation against Germany will follow.

Friedrich Merz is now publicly identified by the Kremlin as a Hitler-like figure. No ifs, ands or buts. He is viewed as the embodiment of German revanchism which will be smashed just as the Nazi armies were smashed 80 years ago. The German nation has been forewarned. We now wait to see how it will respond.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025