Shipping 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 surface-to-air missiles from German military stocks* to Ukraine isn’t the only policy change from Berlin, in an emergency meeting of the Bundestag he told the assembled German parliamentarians that

“In attacking Ukraine, Putin doesn’t just want to eradicate a country from the world map, he is destroying the European security structure…”

As a result Germany would allocate this year €100 billion to modernise the threadbare German armed forces, “From now on, more than 2% of our GDP will be invested in our defence”.

In addition he signalled that renewables alone could not wean Germany off Russian gas, the phasing out of coal would be reconsidered. Germans won’t shiver at Putin’s whim…

*Less widely reported is that  Estonia and the Netherlands were also given the permission of the German government to transfer German-made weapons to Ukraine.