Bernd Pickert, taz:

Denn was Deutschland seit einem Jahr diskutiert, zu große Abhängigkeit von Russland und China, kennt Lateinamerika im Verhältnis zu den USA schon viel länger. Das Auftreten Europas, aber eben auch Chinas und in sehr eingeschränktem Maße auch Russlands nach dem Ende des Kalten Krieges hat Handlungsspielräume und Alternativen eröffnet, die man nicht wieder schließen will.

Zweitens aber auch: Mit Sputnik, RT und dem in Venezuela beheimateten Telesur gibt es gleich drei größere Medienplattformen, die in ganz Lateinamerika tagesaktuell russische Positionen verbreiten. Aufsetzend auf ein westliches Glaub­würdigkeits­problem angesichts der früheren Unterstützung aller noch so brutalen latein­amerikanischen Militärdiktaturen fällt es nicht schwer, alternative Diskurse populär zu machen, wie sie jetzt Brasiliens Präsident in der Pressekonferenz zum Besten gab.

Eine regelbasierte Außen-, Militär- und Menschen­rechts­politik, wie sie Europa jetzt zu Recht in der Ukraine verteidigt, hat Lateinamerika weder von den USA noch von Europa erfahren, im Gegenteil. Eine Äquidistanz zu beiden kriegführenden Parteien, wie sie Lula andeutet, ist da noch das Beste, was der Westen erwarten kann.

Spiegel:

Doppelmoral gehört zum Wesen von Demokratien, sie können ihre eigenen Standards nicht immer erfüllen. Sie müssen wirtschaftlich gedeihen und deshalb Kompromisse machen.

Aber bei Scholz geht die Schere sehr weit auseinander. Er sammelt Demokratie­punkte da, wo sie billig zu haben sind. Und in den Ländern, wo es weh täte, aber bitter nötig wäre, über demokratische Werte zu reden, schweigt er sich weitgehend aus.

Baerbock at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe:

“When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.”

These are the words of Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner. His experience of the horrors of the Shoah and the Second World War made him a lifelong believer in the need to stand up for human rights, regardless of where violations occur and to whom. Wiesel was convinced that when human rights are violated, that is a warning signal for what there is to come.

I find Baerbock pretty unlistenable. She’s banal, formulaic, as if her address was produced by the same staff cut-and-paste plagiarism that her book was. She begins a speech on Europe responding to an invasion by saying national borders have become irrelevant? „Sensitivities“ are irrelevant? Sensitivities like concern about nuclear war? The headlines are filled with Baerbock’s declaration of war, and rightly so. Germany’s shipping tanks and its foreign minister announcing that Europe is fighting a war against Russia is certainly cause for headlines, but as important to me is the level of mediocrity evident in Scholz and Baerbock’s utterances.

Wikipedia:

In Lithuania and Belarus, Poles are more numerous than in Ukraine. This is the result of the Polish population transfers (1944–1946)^[45] as well as Massacres of Poles in Wołyń Voivodeship. Those Poles who survived the slaughter begged for the opportunity to emigrate.^[14]

Wikipedia:

People who moved from the East to the Recovered Territories talked amongst themselves about their return to Lwów and other eastern locations, and the German return to Silesia, as a result of World War III, in which Western Allies would defeat the Soviets. One of the adages of the postwar period was: „Just one atom bomb, and we will be back in Lwów again. Just second one is small but strong and we will be back in Wilno again.“ („Jedna bomba atomowa i wrócimy znów do Lwowa. Druga mała, ale silna i wrócimy znów do Wilna“).^[22][23] Polish settlers in former German areas were insecure about their future there until the 1970s (see Warschauer Kniefall). Eastern settlers did not feel at home in Lower Silesia, and as a result, they did not care about the machinery, households and farms abandoned by Germans. Lubomierz in 1945 was in good condition, but in the following years, Polish settlers from the area of Czortków in Podolia let it run down and become a ruin. The Germans were aware of it. In 1959, German sources wrote that Lower Silesia had been ruined by the Poles. Zdzisław Mach, a sociologist from the Jagiellonian University, explains that when Poles were forced to resettle in the West, which they resented, they had to leave the land they considered sacred and move to areas inhabited by the enemy. In addition, Communist authorities did not initially invest in the Recovered Territories because, like the settlers, for a long time they were unsure about the future of these lands. As Mach says, people in Western Poland for years lived „on their suitcases“, with all their belongings packed in case of return to the East.

Guardian:

Before the war, corruption scandals were an almost daily feature of Ukrainian political life. The country was ranked 122 out of 180 by Transparency International in 2021, making it one of the world’s most corrupt countries. The EU has made anti-corruption reforms one of the key requirements for Ukraine gaining EU membership.

Since the war, there have been far fewer known instances of corruption as society focused on the wartime effort. But journalists have returned to scrutinising the elites in recent months.

„The elites“ is a phrase which nearly a year ago seemed to exit from use in describing Ukrainians — it has been Russia which has elites, more commonly „oligarchs“, while Ukraine has been a bastion of classless democrats heroically protecting Western Europe and by extension the United States from the ravages of totalitarianism.