In a 12-minute section of an interview program of the German Kontrafunk radio, former German diplomat for the United Nations and current Member of the European Parliament from the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) party Michael von der Schulenburg said this morning very clearly that Western diplomacy not only has failed in the Ukraine conflict, but that the West has undermined it. Western geopoliticians simply do not want a neutral Ukraine, he said; they want it as a bridgehead to Asia, which is why the March-April 2022 Istanbul peace process was rejected. It is even irrelevant if some people disagree with Putin, Schulenburg said, because diplomacy is there to provide a format for adversaries that have killed each other before, to talk. But there are foreign ministers in the West who have no diplomacy at all. Diplomacy—which would have taken account of justified Russian security concerns— would have prevented the Ukraine war in the first place.
The Charter of the United Nations, for which von der Schulenburg has worked, could be an orientation point for diplomacy, but it was pushed entirely aside by the U.S. Wolfowitz Doctrine in 1992, he noted. The West, particularly the European Union, does not want to take the UN seriously; their policy is Pax Americana, the continuation of Pax Britannica. The Global South thinks differently, for countries like India, Brazil, South Africa, the UN Charter is the hope for a better future, continued Schulenburg. This is also shown in the fact that an article he recently wrote could not be published in Germany. It was later published in Switzerland, but with a changed headline and without the introduction. It was finally published in full in India, where the publication even added the UN preamble for the readers.
