pro Russia:Originally Posted by kaur
Schröder - de facto disrespected former Chancellor, without substantial political influence in Germany
Schmidt - much-respect elder statesman and former Chancellor (West Germany), but he was already over 70 when the wall fell...he hasn't exactly the most agile mind nowadays
Gysi - 100% political opposition (far) left wing figurehead with rhetoric gift, but without ability to influence national policies
far right wingers - some are in love with authoritarian strongman Putin as anti-homo, anti-Muslim crusader et cetera, others prefer to foster their condescension towards slavs.
There is a (correct) assertion that the mainstream media reports on the Ukraine with a bias, preferring the counter-Putin side of affairs. The fascist component of the revolution and of the new cabinet didn't get much attention in the news and negligible political groups such as the Klitchko brothers were hyped, for example.
Now imagine how the other Western media are biased if in a country accused to be too pro-Russia the mainstream media can be correctly accused of having a counter-Russia bias.
I suppose it's a 'both sides are bad' case - as usual.
Principles are still to be applied on 'good' and 'bad', and the right to self-determination was with Russia in the Crimea case as it was with the EU in the Kosovo case. At least Russia didn't bomb the Ukraine generally for months before it invaded the Crimea (as we did with Yugoslavia/Kosovo, supposedly to stop atrocities which were afterwards almost entirely disproved).
Russia's methods are illegal, but it has a point: The self-determination right of the people in the majority Russian districts (the sovereignty of the Ukraine stems from the same principle).
Now it's possible to point at a plurality of opinions in Germany and to point at non-enthusiastic opinions in Germany which take the greyscale nature of the conflict into account and to assert that Germany is Russia-friendly.
Well, I suppose a pluralistic society looks like this. It might be better to appraise the difficulty of the conflict than to go into an all-out adversary mode knowing only "containment", "sanctions" and turning the Ukraine into a proxy.
It's unlikely that the international community finds cure the root of the problem if major countries have a 100% adversary stance. I think the poorly-drawn borders are the problem, not a Putin regime attempt to re-establish the Russian empire. He may want it, but it would be way out of reach if the borders weren't so poorly drawn.
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P.S.: Germany has a positive attitude towards Russia, and it goes both ways.
Germans thank Gorbachev more for the reunification than Bush, Mitterand and Thatcher combined. Russians have forgiven WW2 better than the Dutch or English, for example. Warsaw Bloc 'communist' ideology drove reconciliation efforts during the Cold War: According to ideology, it wasn't nationalities but plutocrats and fascism which caused the war. This may have helped relations despite the real-economy leeching of East Germany.
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the USSR/Russia reached Germany in the past two decades, many of which (notionally all) were descendants of German immigrants to Russia of the 18th century.
Germany supported the Russian state with substantial loans during the 90's without visible strings attached.
It's naive to expect Germans to ditch a fairly good relationship in an instant only because Russia and another non-allied country are now in conflict. There were some lessons learned about how deteriorating relationships in Europe can have severe consequences - lessons which Americans never learned.
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