Including things that we may never really have thought about before. Secondly, security means protecting the freedom of our lives.
Protection from war and violence, from acute, specific threats. This security is made up of three crucial elements that cannot be separated from one another.įirstly, security means the invulnerability of our lives. It is a deeply human longing – reflecting perhaps a need to secure, to affirm or assure, what we all jointly stand for: security for the freedom of our lives.Īnd that is what our National Security Strategy is about. All across the country, people are taking to the streets, protesting for peace and freedom and security.Īnd we are experiencing a longing that we have probably not felt for a long time, that my generation has perhaps never really felt: a longing for security. Today, our children ask us over breakfast, over lunch, over dinner, whether the war will come to us here in Germany, what nuclear weapons are. When we included the presentation of a national security strategy in our coalition agreement, I expect that barely any of us here in this room – and indeed anywhere in the world – could have imagined what is now happening: the Russian President is attacking his neighbour, he is breaking with our peaceful order in Europe, and he is breaking with the Charter of the United Nations. We are witnessing a brutal war of aggression a ten-hour drive from here, in the heart of Europe. I doubt that any of us could ever have imagined this.
And now it is a ten-hour drive that separates us from peace and war. A ten-hour drive.Ī ten-hour drive that would normally be entirely ordinary. The distance from Berlin to Kyiv, or to beyond the Ukrainian border, is about the same as from Flensburg to Freiburg.
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