Dear Reader,

Last Thursday Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke by video link to the Bundestag. It was a brilliant and moving speech in which he told of how Germany had constructed a wall between itself and Ukraine.

This is a wall which no one on the Ukrainian side can see, he said. But it exists and it’s made of money. The German mantra of “Wirtschaft, Wirtschaft, Wirtschaft” had led Berlin to “build economic bridges” to Russia over a wall that cut Ukraine off from free Europe. Even now, as bombs are falling on Ukrainian homes and thousands are dying, many German politicians refuse to look over the wall and see the suffering, he said.