“We have just received confirmation that the tank will arrive on time,” they celebrate. Enno Lenze and Wieland Giebel, from Berlin Story Bunker, who on February 24 will place a destroyed Russian T-72 tank on the Ukrainian battlefield in front of the Russian Embassy in Berlin, the imposing building on Unter den Linden avenue. “This action is a sign of our protest against the Russian war and intends to express our solidarity with Ukraine,” they explain their intentions, “we have managed to allow the tank to remain in front of the Russian embassy for a weekend and we hope it will serve to that many Berliners come to express their protest. On the first anniversary of the war on European soil, they want Berlin to offer Russia and the entire world an unequivocal image of support for Ukraine.
On the eve of Christmas 2021, the Russian ambassador in Berlin, SErguei Nechaev, was publicly outraged by fears of Russia invading Ukraine stemming from troop movements on the border, and rebuked anyone who dared to suggest such a possibility, calling it absurd. Time took away his reason and credibility.
Last January, when Germany finally agreed to the delivery of Leopard main battle tanks to Ukraine, Nechaev stated that the country had “definitely renounced its historical responsibility before our people for the terrible crimes of Nazism during the Great Patriotic War, which have no statute of limitations.” » and referred to the «difficult path of reconciliation between Russians and Germans». “We are now convinced that Germany, like its closest allies, is not interested in a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis, is prepared to constantly escalate it and endlessly stuff the Kiev regime with ever deadlier weapons.” , said. “This February 24, he will contemplate a destroyed Russian tank from his office and will be able to reflect on the way in which Ukraine is being supported by democracies in its resistance,” say the volunteers of the initiative, “it is a symbol of the fall of Russia” .
Battle in the German capital
On the day the Russians withdrew, in early April 2022, Enno Lenze headed for Bucha. In the suburbs of Kiev he found this tank, which had been destroyed on March 31 by Ukrainian soldiers outside the town of Dmytrivkka, near Bucha, presumably by an HPD F2 mine. It was there that the idea of placing a tank in front of the Russian Embassy in Berlin was born. The T-72B is 3.46 meters wide, 2.23 meters high and 6.90 meters long, plus a 9.53 meter barrel. Its weight, 44 tons, has made its transfer to Berlin, crossing war territory, become a great adventure.
While the perilous journey was taking place, another battle was taking place in the German capital, this time a bureaucratic battle. To begin with, a large amount of documentation was necessary to get the tank, loaded on a truck, to cross border after border. Although the toughest enemy to crack has been the Berlin-Mitte district, which for months opposed this action “with all kinds of excuses,” say the organizers, “they claimed that the security of the city would be endangered, that Syrian refugees could be traumatized, cyclists could get distracted and fall…». The lawyer Patrick Heinemann had to defend the case before an administrative court in Berlin, before which Wieland Giebel explained that “we want to put the garbage back in front of the doors of the terrorists who have murdered, looted and expelled millions of people.”
The initiative’s website (https://www.berlinstory.de/tank/) denounces that the Russian army now treats Ukrainians as “non-persons”, “as the Nazi army did during World War II” and the organizers boast that “we are only fulfilling Putin’s wish to see Russian tanks in Berlin again, though not in the way he hoped.”
