2025-09-10
32 分钟This is The Guardian.
Hi, my name's Patrick Winter and I'm the author of an article entitled,
We Were All Wrong, How Germany Got Hooked.
on Russian energy and it was published in 2022.
Well slightly oddly I studied history at university and I largely forgot about history for a long time after university
because I was covering politics which was very immediate and nowish and then when I moved to write about international relations I slowly discovered how useful it had been to study history both
because it helps you to think about why other people think the way they do and there's always a reason for it.
And the second was just to understand how much of what you are reporting on now is born of events,
10, 20 years, 30 years previously.
And in this case,
I was writing about the sort of build up and start of the Ukraine war and how Russia had invaded.
And one of the things that became incredibly clear very early on was the degree to which Germany was in a contradictory position of being very supportive of Ukraine and Zelensky and its sovereignty and at the same time it was pouring money into the Russian coffers and so arming and funding the arming of the Russian army that was causing so much damage in Ukraine and had just started to think about why this contradiction existed,
why it was so difficult for Germany to extricate itself from that.
the reasons weren't purely economic, they were also ideological.
A lot of the article was really looking at the early battles going on inside the German coalition government about trying to wean itself off Russian energy,
and to a large degree it has,
but not completely by any means, and there's still huge loopholes in the way the sanctions operate,
but a lot of the pipelines that were these sort of arteries of...
Both money and ideological links have closed so all these pipelines are now gone and I think it's been accepted that it was a huge mistake inside Germany to have been so dependent upon an authoritarian government like Russia and that actually this idea of trying to change the way in which countries think by trading with them doesn't work.
So that's been a big shift in everyone's thinking that trade isn't necessarily a lubricant to new ideology.