Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has plunged Europe into an era of insecurity, says the German president.
“When we look at the Russia of today, there is no room for old dreams,” President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said, referring to former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s dream of a “common European home”.
“It has also plunged us in Germany into another time, into an insecurity we thought we had overcome: a time marked by war, violence and flight, by concerns about the expansion of war into a wildfire in Europe,” he said.
“Harder years, rough years are coming.”
The president, who is from a wing of Germany’s Social Democrats that long argued for closer economic ties to Moscow, said the February 24 invasion had ruptured those hopes.
