Germany cooperated with Putin's army AFTER his aggression in Georgia

From TVP World:

"Berlin ‘planned to train Russian forces’ before Putin’s Crimea grab

Ewan Jones, 11.10.2025

Germany was engaged in major plans to help train and modernize the Russian army until Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014, German weekly Der Spiegel has reported.

Among the plans were the creation of training centers in Russia as part of a billion-euro deal, the weekly wrote on Friday. 

According to the paper, the plans were hatched following the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, which exposed the poor state of Russia’s military.  

Following the campaign, President Vladimir Putin ordered an overhaul of Russia’s armed forces to bring them into the 21st century. And his partner of choice was Germany. 

Berlin under Chancellor Angela Merkel was more than enthusiastic about the prospect and put pressure on Germany’s defense sector to cooperate with Moscow.

One of the key plans was the creation of eight training centers across Russia, featuring the latest state-of-the art laser technology to simulate modern combat. The industrial partner in the enterprise was to be German defense giant Rheinmetall. 

Berlin justified the plans in terms of realpolitik. "We have a security policy interest in a modern, well-led Russian army," said then-defense minister Thomas de Maizière in 2011.

The German government’s rationale was that military cooperation engenders trust, and trust secures peace, according to Der Spiegel. The federal government also hoped to learn more about Russia’s military vulnerabilities through the arrangements.

Officers and officials were exchanged at the highest levels, plans were forged for a billion-euro deal between Rheinmetall and Russia’s defense ministry, and military drills were foreseen inside Russia, by NATO’s eastern flank. 

These exercises sent alarm bells ringing in Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states, Der Spiegel wrote, as they raised the specter of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that led to World War II. 

The rest of NATO did not share Germany’s good faith in Moscow, nor the conviction that cooperation was the road to peace and security in Europe. 

But the plans continued, including a €135 million contract for Rheinmetall to build the first training complex, in Russia’s Volga region. The first joint military exercises were planned for 2014.

But geopolitics took a different turn. Even before Russia’s annexation that year of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, a Russian army general, Valery Gerasimov, gave a notorious speech at the Academy of Military Sciences in which he said the rules of war had changed. 

The so-called Gerasimov Doctrine was that war does not need to be declared or even fought. The same objectives, he argued, could be achieved through the "widespread use of disinformation, political, economic, humanitarian, and other non-military measures."

The new reality was too real for Berlin’s realpolitik and the military pact with Moscow was shelved. Rheinmetall threatened legal action against its own government and main customer for lost contracts, but the parties eventually reached a settlement out of court. 

The equipment earmarked the Volga training center remains in storage by Rheinmetall and, after Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the company considered making it available to Ukraine free of charge, as an act of solidarity as well as a PR stunt, Der Spiegel reported.

The training center in Mulino, Volga, went ahead without Rheinmetall and in 2021 served as one of the venues for Russia’s last big ‘Zapad’ training maneuvers prior to its invasion of its western neighbor."