Some questions deserve answers while others deserve only rebukes

We then have questions that are so morally grotesque, so historically tone-deaf, that one is compelled to pause and ask whether the person asking them has ever considered the weight of history standing behind his own words.

We can also question the substance the questioner consumed before asking a question that no sentient being who is not drunk would ever ask.

At a press conference in Belgrade, German journalist Michael Martens reportedly asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: “Can you tell us Europeans what we can concretely do to help you kill more Russians, more Russian soldiers, of course?”

However hard we tried, it is difficult to imagine a more revealing formulation.

We should be shocked that in 2026, a European, especially a German with the weight of two disastrous World Wars behind him, did not ask what Europe can do to help end the war, or what Europe can do to save Ukrainian lives. Mr. Martens did not even ask: What diplomatic initiative might bring this catastrophe to an end?

His question was how “we Europeans” could help kill more Russians.

The vulgarity of Michael Martens’ question would be disturbing enough coming from anyone, but coming from a German journalist, in Belgrade of all places, it acquires an altogether different historical resonance.

It’s beyond belief in its sheer audacity and inhumanity. It also reveals an unbelievable lack of self and historical awareness.

Martens is not some anonymous provocateur shouting from a street corner. He writes for one of Germany’s most popular establishment newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

And, except for the profoundly illiterate, Belgrade is not an accidental geographical setting.

Yugoslavia suffered the brutality of German occupation during the Second World War. Belgrade was extensively bombed by NATO in 1999.

The city in which Mr Marten asked his question therefore carries memories of precisely the kind of European military catastrophe that the post-war generation solemnly promised would never again be allowed to consume the continent.

The questioner's personal history is equally uncomfortable. Martens’ grandfather, Dr. Ernst von Schlabrendorff, served as a prosecutor and officer within the Wehrmacht’s High Command.

With such a background, one would expect people like Mr. Martens to be circumspect and not talk casually about killing Russians who lost 27 million fighting Germany’s imposed wars.

We did not mean to rake up old wounds. Still, the grandson of a man who served within the military apparatus of Nazi Germany asking what Europeans can do to “kill more Russians” inevitably invites historical reflection.

The question here is not whether Martens personally shares his grandfather's worldview, but why the language of killing Russians has become sufficiently normalized within sections of contemporary European discourse that a German journalist can utter it publicly without apparently recognizing its extraordinary historical ugliness.

Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 in an ideological war of annihilation. The scale of the resulting catastrophe is almost beyond comprehension. The documented fact is that 27 million Soviet citizens died during the Second World War. The city of Leningrad alone endured an 872-day siege in which hundreds of thousands perished from starvation, disease, bombardment, and cold. Entire villages and towns disappeared.

The Eastern Front was not merely another theatre of the war; it was the principal killing field of the European catastrophe.

Unlike Europeans who suffer from historic amnesia and are on the march to revanchism, for Russians, the Second World War is not an historical chapter that ended in 1945. It is firmly embedded in national memory, family history, and the deepest layers of the Russian understanding of national survival.

Russians call it the Great War and remember it every year.

Thus, for a German to speak casually, eighty years later, about helping Europeans kill more Russians is not merely journalism at its crudest; it’s an extraordinarily careless invocation of one of Europe's darkest historical memories.

Contrary to what Western mythorians who masquerade as historians want us to believe, Germany’s historical record of militarised violence did not begin with Hitler.

Long before the Third Reich, German colonialism had already demonstrated what happens when a European state convinces itself that another people can be sacrificed in the pursuit of imperial objectives.

In German South West Africa, present-day Namibia, General Lothar von Trotha issued his infamous extermination order against the Herero in 1904. Tens of thousands of Herero and Nama were killed through massacres, starvation, forced displacement, concentration camps, and deliberate deprivation.

I chronicled it in my article “Who Owns Papa’s Land?”: https://femiakogun.substack.com/p/who-owns-papas-land?r=3wwyw

The point here is to recognize something more profoundly uncomfortable: European history contains repeated examples of states transforming political objectives into moral licenses for violence on an industrial scale, and of educated and technically advanced societies finding sophisticated language to sanitize brutality.

The vocabulary, machinery, victims, and the uniforms change, but the moral process is remarkably familiar.

Europeans first transformed their enemies into an abstraction. His humanity is gradually removed from public discourse so that death becomes a mere statistic, and the utter destruction of the enemy becomes a strategic objective. Eventually, people begin discussing how to kill him more efficiently, and the language of murder acquires the respectable vocabulary of policy.

This is why we should not dismiss the question asked in Belgrade as an unfortunate journalistic formulation, or a gaffe; it belongs to a larger transformation in European strategic thinking.

After 1945, Germany built an entire political culture around the repudiation of militarism. Its constitutional order was deliberately designed to prevent the return of the old German militarist tradition. For decades, German political leaders spoke with caution about the deployment of military force. Yet Germany today is undergoing a profound strategic reorientation.

Berlin has announced a dramatic expansion of military expenditure. The Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has repeatedly used the term kriegstüchtig, essentially capable of waging war, to describe the Bundeswehr that Germany believes it needs.

German Chancellor Merz has not only proposed creating a German military that would be the largest in Europe, but has also expressed willingness to lead Europe again.

He was not being ironic.
Only the historically myopic would ignore the historical significance of this transformation merely because contemporary Germany insists that its intentions are defensive.

The issue here is not Germany’s right to security; it’s the strategic environment in which that security is now being defined, and the increasingly confrontational manner in which Europe is responding to Russia.

This is where a broader geopolitical argument becomes unavoidable. There is little doubt that Western Powers, buoyed by an insane sense of triumphalism, made a profound strategic miscalculation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They interpreted the extraordinary American predominance of the 1990s as though it represented the permanent structure of international politics.

The unipolar moment was mistaken for the end of history, as Mr. Fukuyama so erroneously propounded in 1992 in his very silly book. NATO expanded steadily eastward. Russia’s protests were swept aside. Unfortunate and arrogantly, Western capitals generally interpreted those protests as evidence of Russian revanchism rather than as an expression of the security anxieties of a great power watching a rival military alliance move progressively closer to its borders.

This is one of the central failures of Western policy toward Russia. Instead of attempting to understand the strategic architecture that produced the confrontation in Ukraine, Europe increasingly speaks as though the conflict can be resolved simply by supplying more weapons, imposing more sanctions, and inflicting sufficient military pain upon Russia.

They announced their aim as a “Strategic Defeat” of Russia. How anyone with brains could think that the nation with the largest nuclear arsenal would allow itself to be defeated operationally, strategically, or even tactically is a question the Braniacs at NATO or the EU appear not to have asked themselves.

My GoTo geopolitical analyst, Alastair Crooke’s, offers broader geopolitical analysis that is useful here because he recognizes that the conflict in Ukraine or Iran is larger than the battlefield. What is unfolding is part of the violent transition from the post-Cold War order to a genuinely multipolar international system. The West is confronting the loss of an extraordinary historical privilege: the ability to define the international system largely on its own terms.

That’s the Thucydides Trap that President Xi Jinping mentioned in his discussion with Trump.

To observers of the geopolitical chessboard, Russia is challenging the European security order. China is challenging American primacy in Asia. The Global South is increasingly unwilling to accept that Washington, Brussels or London should possess the final word on questions that affect the entire planet.

Europe, however, appears determined to interpret this transformation primarily through the language of confrontation.

And now we hear a German journalist asking how “we Europeans” can help kill more Russians.

One is tempted to ask whether Europe has learned anything at all from the twentieth century.

Europe has already twice managed to transform its internal rivalries into catastrophes that engulfed the world. The First World War emerged from a European system of alliances, militarism, nationalism and strategic miscalculation.

The Second World War followed less than a generation later, with Germany once again at the center of the continental conflagration. Tens of millions died. Europe destroyed itself. Yet today, the continent is once again discussing military preparedness, strategic depth, rearmament and confrontation with Russia as though history were merely an old photograph gathering dust in an attic.

The real question of the Belgrade question is: did Europe learn any lesson from its two misadventures?

Africa should not be interested in helping Europeans kill more Russians. Africa should be interested in preventing Europeans, Russians, Americans, Chinese, or anyone else from turning the planet into another battlefield for competing imperial ambitions.

As we always counsel on this blog, Africa has no business jumping into anyone’s fray. When Europe and the US choose confrontation, Africa should choose sovereignty.

And when Europeans begin speaking casually about killing more Russians, Africans should remember the oldest lesson of history: the people who start wars rarely control where the fires eventually burn.

Africa has spent centuries paying for other people’s wars; it is time for us to stop being stupid cannon fodder in wars that have nothing to do with us.

©️ Ọ̀dọ̀fin Fẹ́mi Akọ́mọláfẹ́ (1st Dan, Ọ̀dọ̀fin I of Kasoa)

(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst.)

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