The starting shot was given by the German chancellor Angela Merkel. When she expressed her solidarity with asylum seeking people at a press conference in late August 2015, her statement could not be interpreted differently than an invitation to Germany. And even more so, when she spoke about «German flexibility» at the same press conference meaning an overthrow of Dublin agreements, which oblige each EU-member state to register asylum seekers wherever they touch EU-soil for the first time and to take them back in case they ask for asylum in another state…

Coming from Vienna on our way to the Frankfurt book-fair, we had to cross the Austrian-German border. Border control was abolished since the treaty of Schengen (implemented in 1995) guarantees free movement within the territories of its member states. Only this time the highway was totally blocked. Cars and lorries queued up for 20 kilometres and more, nothing moved. Drivers came out of their cars, families started to use the highway as a playground. More than an hour passed before the queue started to move again slowly…

In addition to military intervention, Western allies since two decades operate by means of soft power. So-called «coloured revolutions» are playing the «civil card» for Western interests… For Ukraine the period of «soft power»-intervention ended with the appeal of right-wing nationalists to arm activists on the 19th of February 2014… Brussels and Washington accelerated the pressure on the Ukraine government and the president. Their motto was: regime change by all means… The Russian reaction was foreseeable. One could see that Putin not only had learned his lesson in the field of using soft power, but also on the military front. Russian arguments for military action in Crimea equal Western ones. Putin’s press-officers and his whole government speak of «protecting human rights and national self-determination» like their Western opponents did and do…