Olaf Scholz on why Vladimir Putin’s brutal imperialism will fail

EARLIER THIS month, outside the small Lithuanian town of Pabradė, alongside Lithuania’s president, Gitanas Nausėda, I witnessed German Boxer tanks roaring over a sandy plain. Less than 10km from the border with Belarus, deafening mortar shells were being fired. Bushes and trees were cast in thick layers of smoke. And yet the contrast could not have been greater compared to the time when Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht marched into Lithuania 83 years ago and turned that country and the other states of Central and Eastern Europe into “bloodlands”—a term aptly coined by Timothy Snyder, a historian. This time, German troops came in peace, to defend freedom and to deter an imperialist aggressor together with their Lithuanian allies.