“Putin thinks we are complete wimps,” complains FDP politician Strack-Zimmermann

EU defense politician Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (FDP) has warned that Russia's strategy of dividing society could work. "Vladimir Putin is playing for time. He thinks we are complete wimps and says: 'If I penetrate them long enough, then society will fall apart,'" said the chairwoman of the Committee for Security and Defense in the EU Parliament in a video interview with the editorial network Germany (RND). “We have to take this seriously because it creates fear and uncertainty – and fear is always a very bad advisor.”

Strack-Zimmermann sees no progress by Russian forces on the battlefield. “Russia is deeply unsuccessful in Ukraine, the front is frozen, but not only is it losing 30,000 soldiers a month, it is investing everything.”

In the interview, the FDP politician calls for a self-check: "The state can't protect everything and that's why I want institutions and large companies to check themselves: Where am I vulnerable and what hybrid attacks could happen? To believe that someone will jump out of the cake and say how everything works - that won't happen."

Kretschmer is “not only too naive to recognize that Russia proves every day that it does not want to negotiate,” wrote the FDP politician on Platform X. He also wants Germany to co-finance the “Russian war machine” in order to “cause even more suffering and deaths.” The Prime Minister is “really one of the Union’s biggest foreign policy wrong-doers”.