Berlin... Ukraine Crisis to Birth New Era Bearing Putin’s Fingerprints

Demonstration in front of the Brandenburg Gate in central Berlin against the Russian war in Ukraine (EPA)
Demonstration in front of the Brandenburg Gate in central Berlin against the Russian war in Ukraine (EPA)
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Berlin... Ukraine Crisis to Birth New Era Bearing Putin’s Fingerprints

Demonstration in front of the Brandenburg Gate in central Berlin against the Russian war in Ukraine (EPA)
Demonstration in front of the Brandenburg Gate in central Berlin against the Russian war in Ukraine (EPA)

Journalists are like grave diggers. They live off the tragedies of the world. They dream of being present at major turns and events that are usually soaked in blood, costly to the economy and beget refugees. They find joy in writing from within upheaval. In that tradition, I am writing this article.

Shortly after my arrival in Berlin, I felt the ‘end of an era,’ the conclusion of a chapter in the life of Europe and the world, and the birth of a chapter bears the hallmarks of the Tsar sitting on Lenin’s throne.

More than three decades ago, Asharq Al-Awsat sent me to this place. Together with an army of journalists, I witnessed the death of the most famous generals of the second half of the last century. Its name was the Berlin Wall.

Experience suggests that journalists yearn for the scenes of violent shocks just as the perpetrator longs for the scene of his crime. Maybe that's why I took my bag to that town. Perhaps I was motivated by the desire to witness the end of the world that was born from the collapse of that Wall.

When I slept near the Wall in 1989, I did not know the name of the man who they say today killed one world and gave birth to another. There was no reason to know his name. He was an unknown man working for a mysterious service and living under an alias.

His task was thorny: detect and recruit spies. He was trained in sensitive activities such as escaping censorship and prosecution, writing in secret ink, and dealing painful blows if necessary.

The colonel was staying in Dresden, that is, in the country of the “comrades” in East Germany. When the Wall collapsed, he burned some papers and left in disappointment to await new directions from his superiors in the “KGB” empire.

Salt was rubbed into the wound when Russia emerged from the Soviet rubble and was betrayed by many republics that were in the grip of the party. The name of the unknown colonel was Vladimir Putin, and in the new century we will spend thousands of hours tracing his footsteps and searching for his fingerprints.

In 1991, the weld keeping the Soviet Union together disappeared. On the last day of the decade, Putin emerged from the Kremlin carrying a revenge project, which many say was cooked in a military-security room that was dismayed by the humiliation of Russia and the amputation of its Soviet limbs.

Putin’s great vengeance plan was born out of suffering, economic decline, and a weaker ruble.

Red Army officers were selling their uniforms in the streets of cities. Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin's rule faltered to the tunes of corruption. Russia felt humiliated and overwhelmed after the US ambassador became the most powerful man in the country. The US diplomat demanded Lenin's country embrace the Western model that defeated it.

It was necessary to return to Berlin. The fall of the Berlin Wall had announced the birth of a new world with a sole superpower and an outrageous victory for the US. Some believe that the Ukrainian crisis today marks the death of that world and the birth of a new world bearing Putin's fingerprints.

Berlin is a sensitive place to get a good reading about the burden of the Russian war in Ukraine. It is too early to predict what the Russian adventure will lead to. Clearly, Putin has dealt a near-fatal blow to the world that was built on the ashes of the Soviet Union.

Some are confident that Russian tanks crossing the international border with Ukraine heralded the end of stability in the post-Wall world. The Russian war in Ukraine is much more dangerous than the bloody challenges the world has witnessed in the past two decades.

What Putin did is immeasurably more dangerous than what Osama bin Laden did, when he moved the war on terrorism to US soil. And much more dangerous than what Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did when he arose from Mosul, opening the door to a self-proclaimed “caliphate” and a bloody experience that followed.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is also more dangerous than the US’ war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The reason is simple: Putin's war in Ukraine shook the foundations of the international order. After this war, Europe will not be what it was, and the same is true for the whole world.

We are on the verge of a new world. Many are betting that it will be multipolar as the Ukraine war would not have occurred without a growing sense of a decline in US hegemony.

Many are convinced that the US has become incapable of playing the role of a policeman worldwide. They add that the US, after the experiences of China and other countries, is no longer able to claim that the West’s model is the only and obligatory path for technological progress and the fight against poverty. Putin shot the foundations of the “global village.”

What is certain is that the war in Ukraine imposed a major adjustment to the list of priorities in the West. The US was moving to focus its policy and capabilities on containing the rise of China. Suddenly, alarm bells were sounded in the capitals of NATO. The Russian menace is knocking on European doors and re-awakening ghosts that the old continent thought it had buried forever.

Europeans were dumbfounded. Millions of Ukrainian refugees were pouring into neighboring countries. Even at the height of the Yugoslav wars Europeans didn’t face such scenes. Putin went into the war to such an extent that he cannot retreat from it without achieving a coup that is beyond the capacity of the West to bear.

The Russian leader cannot return as a loser, nor can the West see him victorious. The world fell into a big trap. Europeans are watching with concern that a permanent member of the Security Council is imposing forced surgery on the map of an independent European state. The current war in Ukraine is much more dangerous than Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014. It is also much more dangerous than Russia's military intervention in Syria the following year.

The assumption is that a multipolar world is being born. But what if the unprecedented wave of Western sanctions ruined the Russian economy? In this case, will Russia's position regress, so that the duality of US-Chinese rivalry perpetuates? Will Putin have to be the younger brother of the Russia-China alliance?

A few hundred meters from the hotel I’m staying at in Berlin, a Ukrainian flag is fluttering. I was surprised by finding pictures of Putin lying on the ground and a woman nearby holding a banner denouncing the killing of children and women in Ukraine.

At first glance, I thought that the lady was Ukrainian. When I asked, she said that she is a German volunteer who is acting on an individual initiative against “the crime that is being carried out on the territory of Ukraine.”

When I asked about the Putin posters lying on the ground, she replied: “This is their normal place in light of his actions. He is a very dangerous man to the world. Silence means repeating the experiences that killed entire peoples.”



Fear Stalks Tehran as Israel Bombards, Shelters Fill Up and Communicating Grows Harder

Shops remain shuttered Tehran's historic Grand Bazaar, Monday, June 16, 2025. (AP)
Shops remain shuttered Tehran's historic Grand Bazaar, Monday, June 16, 2025. (AP)
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Fear Stalks Tehran as Israel Bombards, Shelters Fill Up and Communicating Grows Harder

Shops remain shuttered Tehran's historic Grand Bazaar, Monday, June 16, 2025. (AP)
Shops remain shuttered Tehran's historic Grand Bazaar, Monday, June 16, 2025. (AP)

The streets of Tehran are empty, businesses closed, communications patchy at best. With no bona fide bomb shelters open to the public, panicked masses spend restless nights on the floors of metro stations as strikes boom overhead.

This is Iran’s capital city, just under a week into a fierce Israeli blitz to destroy the country's nuclear program and its military capabilities. After knocking out much of Iran's air defense system, Israel says its warplanes have free rein over the city's skies. US President Donald Trump on Monday told Tehran's roughly 10 million residents to evacuate “immediately.”

Thousands have fled, spending hours in gridlock as they head toward the suburbs, the Caspian Sea, or even Armenia or Türkiye. But others — those elderly and infirm — are stuck in high-rise apartment buildings. Their relatives fret: what to do?

Israeli strikes on Iran have killed at least 585 people and wounded over 1,300, a human rights group says. State media, also a target of bombardment, have stopped reporting on the attacks, leaving Iranians in the dark. There are few visible signs of state authority: Police appear largely undercover, air raid sirens are unreliable, and there’s scant information on what to do in case of attack.

Shirin, 49, who lives in the southern part of Tehran, said every call or text to friends and family in recent days has felt like it could be the last.

“We don’t know if tomorrow we will be alive,” she said.

Many Iranians feel conflicted. Some support Israel's targeting of Iranian political and military officials they see as repressive. Others staunchly defend the country and retaliatory strikes on Israel. Then, there are those who oppose Iran’s rulers, but still don't want to see their country bombed.

To stay, or to go? The Associated Press interviewed five people in Iran and one Iranian American in the US over the phone. All spoke either on the condition of anonymity or only allowed their first names to be used, for fear of retribution from the state against them or their families.

Most of the calls ended abruptly and within minutes, cutting off conversations as people grew nervous or because the connection dropped. Iran’s government has acknowledged disrupting internet access. It says it's to protect the country, though that has blocked average Iranians from getting information from the outside world.

Iranians in the diaspora wait anxiously for news from relatives. One, an Iranian American human rights researcher in the US, said he last heard from relatives when some were trying to flee Tehran earlier in the week. He believes that lack of gas and traffic prevented them from leaving.

The most heartbreaking interaction, he said, was when his older cousins with whom he grew up in Iran told him “We don’t know where to go. If we die, we die.”

“Their sense was just despair,” he said.

Some families have made the decision to split up.

A 23-year-old Afghan refugee who has lived in Iran for four years said he stayed behind in Tehran but sent his wife and newborn son out of the city after a strike Monday hit a nearby pharmacy.

“It was a very bad shock for them,” he said.

Some, like Shirin, said fleeing was not an option. The apartment buildings in Tehran are towering and dense. Her father has Alzheimer’s and needs an ambulance to move. Her mother's severe arthritis would make even a short trip extremely painful.

Still, hoping escape might be possible, she spent the last several days trying to gather their medications. Her brother waited at a gas station until 3 a.m., only to be turned away when the fuel ran out. As of Monday, gas was being rationed to under 20 liters (5 gallons) per driver at stations across Iran after an Israeli strike set fire to the world's largest gas field.

Some people, like Arshia, said they are just tired.

“I don’t want to go in traffic for 40 hours, 30 hours, 20 hours, just to get to somewhere that might get bombed eventually,” he said.

The 22-year-old has been staying in the house with his parents since the initial Israeli strike. He said his once-lively neighborhood of Saadat Abad in northwestern Tehran is now a ghost town. Schools are closed. Very few people even step outside to walk their dogs. Most local stores have run out of drinking water and cooking oil. Others closed.

Still, Arshia said the prospect of finding a new place is too daunting.

“We don’t have the resources to leave at the moment,” he said.

Residents are on their own

No air raid sirens went off as Israeli strikes began pounding Tehran before dawn Friday. For many, it was an early sign civilians would have to go it alone.

During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Tehran was a low-slung city, many homes had basements to shelter in, and there were air raid drills and sirens. Now the capital is packed with close-built high-rise apartments without shelters.

“It's a kind of failing of the past that they didn’t build shelters,” said a 29-year-old Tehran resident who left the city Monday. “Even though we’ve been under the shadow of a war, as long as I can remember.”

Her friend's boyfriend was killed while going to the store.

“You don’t really expect your boyfriend or your anyone, really to leave the house and never return when they just went out for a routine normal shopping trip,” she said.

Those who choose to relocate do so without help from the government. The state has said it is opening mosques, schools and metro stations for use as shelters. Some are closed, others overcrowded.

Hundreds crammed into one Tehran metro station Friday night. Small family groups lay on the floor. One student, a refugee from another country, said she spent 12 hours in the station with her relatives.

“Everyone there was panicking because of the situation,” she said. “Everyone doesn’t know what will happen next, if there is war in the future and what they should do. People think nowhere is safe for them.”

Soon after leaving the station, she saw that Israel had warned a swath of Tehran to evacuate.

“For immigrant communities, this is so hard to live in this kind of situation,” she said, explaining she feels like she has nowhere to escape to, especially not her home country, which she asked not be identified.

Fear of Iran mingles with fear of Israel

For Shirin, the hostilities are bittersweet. Despite being against the theocracy and its treatment of women, the idea that Israel may determine the future does not sit well with her.

“As much as we want the end of this regime, we didn’t want it to come at the hands of a foreign government,” she said. “We would have preferred that if there were to be a change, it would be the result of a people’s movement in Iran.”

Meanwhile, the 29-year-old who left Tehran had an even more basic message for those outside Iran:

“I just want people to remember that whatever is happening here, it’s not routine business for us. People’s lives here — people’s livelihoods — feel as important to them as they feel to anyone in any other place. How would you feel if your city or your country was under bombardment by another country, and people were dying left and right?”

“We are kind of like, this can’t be happening. This can’t be my life.”