“Direct NATO interference could play into Putin's hands,” he writes in a Focus Online op-ed.
In an op-ed in Focus Online on 18 March 2022, Hertie School Professor of International Affairs and Security Julian Wucherpfennig describes a potential strategy Russia might use to increase support for its invasion of Ukraine among the Russian people. According to the expert on international security, Russia might provoke NATO into delivering combat aircraft or a limited airstrike against Russian troops, thereby getting involved on Ukrainian territory. However, “direct NATO interference could play into Putin's hands,” he writes, “because then the enemy would no longer be a regime led by ‘drug-addicted neo-Nazis' committing ‘genocide’ against the ‘brother people’ stranded after the end of the Soviet Union, but the ‘evil’ US-led West.”
Read the full op-ed here (in German).
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Julian Wucherpfennig, Professor of International Affairs and Security