Angela Merkel got in bed with Putin. Because of it she was hit with a flash bomb.
Alas, I have to disappoint both those of you who like juicy gossip and also my Eurosceptic friends whose affection for Frau Merkel is rather subdued.
For neither statement is literal.
As far as I know, my friends Angie and Vlad haven’t consummated their otherwise intimate relationship in any carnal way. They got in bed figuratively, in the sense of pursuing a common policy.
In their recent meeting, immediately after Angie had finished French-kissing every member of the German World Cup team, they agreed to put pressure on the Ukraine. Specifically, they want to nudge her government towards opening negotiations with the ‘separatists’.
Actually, these chaps aren’t separatists at all. They’re Vlad’s storm troopers. Few of them are from the Ukraine, some have never been anywhere near the place before. All, however, are trained and equipped by the Russian army or, mostly, Putin’s colleagues in the KGB/FSB.
The equipment is fairly sophisticated, including SAMs, tanks, flame throwers, artillery, Grad multiple rocket launchers and of course a life’s supply of AKs.
The training includes standard infantry tactics, urban terrorism, communications, interrogation techniques.
Presumably, this academic curriculum doesn’t cover torture, rape and robbery, but Putin’s lads don’t need any tuition there. As numerous field tests have shown, they do famously in those disciplines. Their natural talents are sufficient to make them star pupils.
These paramilitary thugs aren’t pursuing any objectives of their own. They don’t want political autonomy, secession from the Ukraine or anything like it. They want just one thing: whatever Vlad wants.
Being a forthright chap, something rare in the ranks of the KGB, Vlad makes no secret of his desires. He wants to undo what he calls “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”, the collapse of the Soviet Union.
One would have thought that the twentieth century saw worse catastrophes than the weakening of an empire that had enslaved half of Europe and all of its own people, murdering about 60 million of them. But Vlad is entitled to his own opinion.
The empire that Ronald Reagan once called evil would have remained evil even without the Ukraine, but it wouldn’t have been an empire. The Ukraine meant even more to the Soviet empire than India did to the British one.
Since the only way to undo the ‘catastrophe’ is to rebuild the empire, the Ukraine must be brought back into the fold. That’s what Vlad wants, and that’s why he has trained, armed and inspired the ‘separatists’.
They are his proxies, and he needs them because a straight blitzkrieg by the Russian army would make Vlad a pariah in the West, cutting his access to the billions he keeps in Western banks. That simply won’t do, not yet anyway.
No self-respecting government would negotiate with such ‘separatist’ scum. For example, the US administration wouldn’t have negotiated with al-Qaeda after the twin towers had gone down. This though Osama had no plans to occupy Washington DC the way Putin wants to occupy, or at least control, Kiev.
Under such circumstances to negotiate means to surrender, and this is what the Poroshenko government refuses to do. That’s where my friend Angie comes in, at Vlad’s request.
Germany is largely keeping the Ukraine afloat with loans that are unlikely ever to be repaid. Hence Angie feels that she’s paying the piper and is thus entitled to call the tune. This happens to be Vlad’s favourite song too.
The figurative bed partners are two jaws of the same vice, crushing the Ukraine between them. Since Ukrainians feel there’s nothing real they can do to resist the two giants, they resort to symbolic gestures.
Hence the ‘flash bomb’, which in this instance means a spam attack against the enemy Facebook page.
Every post on Angie’s page instantly draws thousands of messages from Ukrainians, all saying the same thing: “Danke, Frau Ribbentrop”.
At a guess, Angie probably resents being compared with Hitler’s Foreign Minister. She’d probably rather be compared with other Germanic figures, such as Charlemagne, Frederic the Great, Bismarck or, at a pinch, a Lorelei.
But Ukrainian flash bombers doubtless feel the comparison is justified. Ribbentrop, after all, co-signed with his Soviet counterpart Molotov the infamous Pact dividing Europe between the two predators, crushing the continent as if Germany and Russia were two jaws of the same vice.
I doubt the parallel is 100 per cent exact. Parallels seldom are. But, vindicating Lobachevsky, Ukrainians obviously feel that these parallel lines do intersect.
In any case, I’ve always been fascinated by the platonic intimacy between my friends Angie and Vlad. They speak each other’s language, using Christian names and familiar personal pronouns during their cosy chats.
I’ve also been known to speculate that this intimacy just may be of long standing. You see, Angie hasn’t always been a great champion of European democracy under Germany’s aegis.
In her East German youth, she held a nomenklatura position of agitprop chief in a regional committee of Freie Deutsche Jugend, the youth organisation typologically similar to its predecessor that also had jugend in its name.
Just as Hitlerjugend had close links with the SS, the FDJ was the breeding ground of the Stasi. The two organisations always worked hand in glove, even though the FDJ nominally reported to the party.
Any holder of a nomenklatura position in the FDJ, such as young Angie, had to work in close contact with the secret police, which in turn was but an extension of the KGB.
At exactly the same time Vlad ran the KGB station at Dresden, just over 100 miles from where Angie did her thing. It’s pure conjecture, but they could well have known each other professionally then, especially since Angie was responsible for the purely KGB function of agitprop.
It’s also not beyond the realm of possibility that Vlad has some leverage over Angie, possibly over a few FDJ skeletons in her cupboard.
In any case, Angie and Vlad may go back a long way, and it’s no wonder that they are so close. Or at least they seem so close to Ukrainians, which is too close for their comfort.