Quoting the unauthorized English translation of Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova on John Helemer’s Russia site:
“For its part, Russia has always remained open to the possibility of using diplomatic and negotiation tools. This has been talked about repeatedly. All this has been applied, and all this is blocked by the Kiev regime under the dictation of the West. The ‘collective West’, NATO, the EU have long abandoned diplomacy, chosen a different path, and began to create security threats, setting fire, inciting, pushing, and simply driving the European continent to a global catastrophe. What is happening now is not a question of Ukraine, Russia or even the European continent. This is a much bigger and global thing.
“You asked about the US decision to supply American tanks. Why highlight this in particular? It is clear that this position applies to all countries. Only one country stands apart. This is Germany. This is a special story. We remember well what German tanks are. These are machines that have become a symbol not just of death and deadly ideology, but of hatred of humanity– a global, existential threat to the entire planet.
The person the poised lady is responding to (and not with overdue deference) is the German chancellor (Alois Schicklgruber, oops, I mean Olaf Sholz).
“When you read about fascism, Nazism, and the times of the Second World War, I think it is obvious that the SS uniform, German tanks with the symbols of the Third Reich have become a global symbol of humanity’s fall into the abyss of hatred, horror, and murder. From this abyss, all of us — and those who were alive then and those born later — were extricated by the fighters of the Red Army and the anti-Hitler coalition. These were young people who fought at the front and all those who were in the rear, connected to them. It was the German tanks which became the anti-symbol that was forever imprinted in the memory of mankind. Now these tanks, as [the Germans] are assuming, will again move on to our land. At least, that’s the task they have been given.
“What do they expect in Germany? That armoured vehicles in camouflage cover with iron crosses – symbols of the German armed forces both then and now — will pass through our cities and villages? We remember how it ended then. Do they remember in Berlin… Everyone has written their names into history in different ways. Germany itself understands perfectly well that Berlin has no moral, legal, or ethical right to supply armoured vehicles and tanks to kill Russians.”
“I want to remind [Olaf] Scholz,” Zakharova said, “I’m not referring to [Foreign Minister Annalena] Baerbock, that seems to me to be pointless — and tell him maybe because he doesn’t know: when German prisoners were on the territory of the Soviet Union after our victory, they were not tortured, they were not mistreated in the same way as the Germans did with our soldiers and civilians in German concentration camps. They were fed by those [Russians] who had not had enough for many years, had nothing to eat for themselves. (I speak softly. In everyday life I would say this differently)… I remember well how in 2015, as part of an official delegation, the then-Minister of Foreign Affairs of Germany [Frank-Walter] Steinmeier arrived in Volgograd. He repented and bowed his head before the graves of both Soviet and German soldiers who have remained on our land. And he said it should never happen again. You [Scholz] are repeating it now.”
“The day of the decision on the supply of Leopards to Ukraine,” Zakharova continued, “is also historic because [it has] concretised what we have been talking about for a long time – the total loss of Germany’s sovereignty. O. Scholz has forever signed the rejection of an independent German foreign policy. He has abandoned everything that his predecessors had built over decades after the Second World War. And in what, by the way, they succeeded.”
These are “fighting words”!
And if I felt I had the right I would say something to our readers about prayer right about now.
