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.”



Father of Six Killed ‘For Piece of Bread’ During Gaza Aid Distribution

 Palestinians carry the body of Hossam Wafi who, according to family members, was killed in an Israeli strike, during his funeral in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Monday, June 2, 2025. (AP)
Palestinians carry the body of Hossam Wafi who, according to family members, was killed in an Israeli strike, during his funeral in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Monday, June 2, 2025. (AP)
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Father of Six Killed ‘For Piece of Bread’ During Gaza Aid Distribution

 Palestinians carry the body of Hossam Wafi who, according to family members, was killed in an Israeli strike, during his funeral in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Monday, June 2, 2025. (AP)
Palestinians carry the body of Hossam Wafi who, according to family members, was killed in an Israeli strike, during his funeral in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Monday, June 2, 2025. (AP)

Cries of grief echoed across southern Gaza's Nasser Hospital Monday as dozens came to mourn Hossam Wafi, after the father of six was killed while attempting to get supplies to feed his family.

His mother, Nahla Wafi, sobbed uncontrollably over her son, who was among 31 people killed by Israeli fire while trying to reach a food distribution site the previous day, according to the Palestinian territory's civil defense agency.

"He went to get food for his daughters and came back dead," said Nahla Wafi, who lost two sons and a nephew on Sunday.

Hossam Wafi had travelled with his brother and nephew to a newly established distribution center in the southern city of Rafah.

"They were just trying to buy (flour). But the drone came down on them," his mother said, as she tried to comfort four of her granddaughters in the courtyard of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.

Israel has faced growing condemnation over the humanitarian crisis in the war-ravaged Gaza Strip, where the United Nations has warned the entire population faces the risk of famine.

-'Go there and get bombed'-

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that its field hospital in Rafah received 179 cases on Sunday, including 21 pronounced dead on arrival.

The ICRC said that all those wounded "said they had been trying to reach an aid distribution site", and that "the majority suffered gunshot or shrapnel wounds".

Israeli authorities and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US and Israeli-backed outfit that runs the distribution centers, denied any such incident took place.

The military instead said that troops fired "warning shots" at people who approached them one kilometer away from the Rafah distribution site before dawn.

A witness told AFP thousands of people gathered at the area, known locally as the Al-Alam junction, between 2:00 and 4:00 am (2300 GMT and 0100 GMT) in the hopes of reaching the distribution center.

At Nasser Hospital, Hossam Wafi's young daughters called out for their father, kissing his body wrapped in a white shroud, before it was taken away.

Outside the hospital, dozens of men stood in silence before the body, praying. Some cried as the remains were taken away, one of them holding the father's face until he was gently pulled away.

His uncle, Ali Wafi, told AFP he felt angry his nephew was killed while trying to get aid.

"They go there and get bombed -- airstrikes, tanks, shelling -- all for a piece of bread," he said.

"He went for a bite of bread, not for anything else. What was he supposed to do? He had to feed his little kids. And the result? He's getting buried today," he added.

- Militarized aid -

The deaths in Rafah were one of two deadly incidents reported by Gaza's civil defense agency on Sunday around the GHF centers, which the UN says contravene basic humanitarian principles and appear designed to cater to Israeli military objectives.

There have been several other reports of chaotic scenes and warning shots fired in connection with the distribution sites over the past week.

The UN's humanitarian agency (OCHA) published a video of one such distribution site in central Gaza's Netzarim corridor on Thursday.

A large crowd is seen gathered around four long corridors made from metal fences installed in the middle of an arid landscape, corralling men and women into files to receive flour.

The distribution site and its waiting area sit on a flattened piece of land surrounded by massive mounds of soil and sand.

It is manned by English-speaking security guards travelling in armored vehicles.

Palestinians exiting the distribution area carry cardboard boxes sometimes bearing a "GHF" logo, as well as wooden pallets presumably to be repurposed as fuel or structures for shelter.

In the large crowd gathered outside the gated corridors, some men are seen shoving each other, and one woman complains that her food package was stolen.

Hossam Wafi's uncle Ali said he wished Gaza's people could safely get aid.

"People take the risk (to reach the distribution site), just so they can survive."