Latest news with #ChristianFreuding
Russia Today
07-07-2025
- Politics
- Russia Today
General YouTube: Germany's newest military chief is a warlord of his own Ukraine-cheering fantasyland
Let's face it: For outside observers, who are not getting a direct boost to career and income, promotions inside ministries can be about as exciting as trainspotting on an abandoned railway branch. But this time is different: Recent changes at the German Ministry of Defense matter, if in a disturbing way. Berlin's energetic, ambitious, popular, and resolutely narrow-minded minister of defense Boris Pistorius has just made some high-level personnel moves. By far the single most politically significant of Pistorius' new appointments is that of Major-General Christian Freuding as the new 'Heeresinspekteur,' the head the land forces (in German: Heer), that is, the army in the strict sense of the term. This is a position of major influence because of the structure of Germany's military and current rearmament plans, both with a key role for the army. Formally, Freuding has not (yet) scored the highest possible military rank. That would be the 'Generalinspekteur der Bundeswehr,' responsible for all four current service branches (army, navy, air force, and the new cyber and information units). But, in reality, Freuding may well already have more political influence than any other German officer. This is due to two factors: Freuding clearly is a favorite of Pistorius. Indeed, his predecessor, General Alfons Mais, was not. Ironically, Mais was no less Russophobic than the worst of them. His bizarre, simplistic, and stereotyped views of Russia as a country that doesn't care about its casualties are now most welcome in Germany (again). But Mais also could be 'inconvenient': Instead of meekly waiting for the politicians to get debt-driven rearmament into economy-draining overdrive, this soldier had a habit of complaining about the wait and making demands. That is one reason Mais is out and Freuding is in. Freuding is a driven as well as rapidly advancing careerist who already served as adjutant to Ursula von der Leyen in those good old days when she was still only devastating the German political landscape. He clearly knows how not to antagonize but please his superiors. One way in which Freuding pleases Pistorius – and virtually the whole German political and mainstream media establishment – is that he is a perfect hardliner with respect to Russia in general and, in particular, when it comes to the West's proxy war against the latter via Ukraine. That has also made him a perfect fit to lead both a new, centralized Defense Ministry planning and coordination body established in 2023 and, at the same time, a special office busy, in essence, with pumping arms into Ukraine. Yet Freuding is not just any die-hard bellicist. He also serves as a dis/information warrior in a class of his own. That's why German mainstream media call him a 'social-media star' and 'the YouTube General' who went 'viral.' Apart from Freuding's presence on traditional TV, there are his frequent appearances on the German military's YouTube channel which score hundreds of thousands of views, occasionally even a million. What seems to have made the often wide-eyed – quite literally – general so popular is a combination of overly optimistic (polite expression) assessments of the Ukrainian and Western position in the Ukraine War, a certain boyish (also polite expression) but – it seems – infectious enthusiasm for arrows and tactical signs on maps, and, last but not least, a relentless insistence to fight this war, in effect, through to the last Ukrainian. And who knows, maybe even beyond that. In the fall of 2022, after Ukraine recaptured some territories at unsustainable cost to men and materiel, Freuding went wild, enthusing about 'incredible successes' and 'euphoria.' Euphoria indeed. Last summer, when Ukraine started its predictably self-devastating offensive into Russia's Kursk Region, Freuding replicated every single daft Kiev propaganda point, including the alleged 'psychological effect' of invading 'core Russian territory.' Incidentally, the excitable general seems to have a traditional German blind spot for just how big Russia is: In reality, the area temporarily seized by Kiev's forces was miniscule – never more than one hundredth of a percent of Russian territory. Freuding also touted this minuscule and doomed incursion as a great 'Mutmacher' (untranslatable, roughly: motivation boost) for the Ukrainian home front. We all know how that Kamikaze operation actually ended. By now, Kiev even finds it financially and politically difficult to accept the corpses of its fallen soldiers when delivered back from Russia: Every single one should trigger major compensation to their families and is testimony to a reckless and lost gamble. When, a month ago, Ukraine launched its criminal (as in the war crime of perfidy) Spiderweb attack on Russian nuclear bombers from within Russia, Freuding detected 'impressive success,' most likely simply following – deliberately or not – initial Ukrainian exaggerations. In reality, the attack did far less military harm than Kiev claimed at first, as even Western mainstream outlets have admitted. Politically, of course, it was devastating – but for Ukraine, whose leadership scored a fleeting PR stunt but provoked a massive Russian response. Freuding has been prolific. Examples of his bizarrely wrongheaded analyses and flatly failed predictions could be multiplied ad infinitum. But you get the gist: One thing his promotion shows is that Germany is once again a country where realism won't get you far in a military career. But wishful thinking wrapped in tactical jargon and scrawled on big maps will. As a German and a historian, I wished I had not seen that pattern before. Freuding's other forte, his enthusiasm for fighting to the last Ukrainian is equally well attested. In his own misguided and euphemistic terms, Freuding is a top representative of those Western friends from hell who have pretended that feeding ever more Ukrainians into this meatgrinder of a proxy war would 'improve Kiev's negotiating position.' Obviously and – again – utterly predictably, the opposite has happened: Ukraine's position is weaker than ever and constantly deteriorating, all at the cost of massive losses. By now, Ukrainian officials and the Western mainstream media have been compelled to admit that 'Ukraine has lost around 40% of its working-age population due to the war' and is facing a 'deep demographic crisis.' And that is an understatement. Yet Freuding sticks to his 'strategy' – if that is the word – of playing for time. It is also important to see Freuding's implausible but apparently (for now) unstoppable rise in a broader context: Bellicist German mainstream media, such as the news magazine Spiegel, now admit that the US is gradually retreating from the proxy war it provoked, abandoning both its Ukrainian proxies and European vassals. German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, meanwhile, oddly combines an obstinate and somewhat delusional urge to keep fighting Russia – for now indirectly – with the realistic, if very late, insight that Ukraine may be reaching its limits. Wadephul's response to this self-imposed absurdity is simple: Germany must do even more for Ukraine. Never mind that the German military has already handed over, for instance, a quarter of its own 12 Patriot air defense systems. After all, there also is the option of buying new ones in the US and shipping them directly to Ukraine, at Berlin's expense, of course. To justify such measures, the German government, with Chancellor Merz in the lead, has dialed up its already hyperventilating war scare rhetoric again. Until recently, the key dogma of the bellicist party line was the unfounded speculation, sold as virtual certainty, that Russia would be ready and willing to attack within a few years from now. Initially, the head of the German military, General Christian Breuer, had started fetishizing the year 2029 into the sum of all hysterical fears. Yet that is no longer good – really, bad – enough. With support from Germany's trusty intelligence services – the same ones that helped the US fake a pretext to launch a devastating war of aggression against Iraq in 2003 and that can't find out who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines – Merz has updated the national panic attack: Now, he has informed his people, we must no longer fear that the Russians are coming because – drum roll – they are already here! Merz, in short, has opined that the definition of 'war' is a major philosophical challenge, that Russia is already attacking Germany in multiple sneaky ways, and that hence, so the clear implication, the two countries are already at war. Not much to lose, then, if we escalate even further: that seems to be the message. This is the stage on which Major-General Freuding has now been called upon to play an even larger role. He is, in a way, the right man for the job and for the moment. Only that the moment is one of officially sanctioned hysteria and delusion, and the job will consist of pretending that Ukraine can still, if not win, somehow improve its situation, while feeding more arms and money to it so that more of its people and territory can be lost. Freuding, in sum, may be quite mad, but his whole career shows that he is a team player. His madness, at this point, is that of the whole German establishment. He is a good fit for a very bad set of ideas and policies. How ironic. And how German, too, in a way.
Straits Times
07-06-2025
- Business
- Straits Times
Europe can sustain Ukraine's war effort without US, German general says
Europe can sustain Ukraine's war effort without US, German general says BERLIN - Europe is capable of sustaining Ukraine's resistance against Russia, even if the United States were to decide to completely halt its military support to Kyiv, the senior military official in charge of coordinating Germany's arms supplies told Reuters. Major-General Christian Freuding said Nato's European members plus Canada had already exceeded the estimated US$20 billion (S$25 billion) worth of US military aid provided in 2024 to Kyiv. They accounted for around 60 per cent of the total costs borne by the Western allies, he said. "The war against Ukraine is raging on our continent, it is also being waged against the European security order. If the political will is there, then the means will also be there to largely compensate for the American support," Maj-Gen Freuding said in an interview. Ukraine continues to receive weapons deliveries approved by former US president Joe Biden. It is unclear, however, whether his successor Donald Trump will sign off on any new supplies - or allow third countries to purchase US weapons for Kyiv. Asked how long the Biden-approved deliveries will sustain Kyiv, Maj-Gen Freuding said this depended on logistical processes as well as the speed at which Ukraine burns through arms and ammunition, but that the summer seemed a realistic estimate. "How the American government handles further requests for military support for Ukraine is unclear at the moment. We can't say anything about that," he added. "In general, the US has a great interest in boosting its own defence industry. I make the cautious assumption that at least purchasing US defence goods, and delivering them to Ukraine, will be possible." Russian rearmament Addressing the potential threat that Russia might pose beyond Ukraine, Maj-Gen Freuding said Moscow had a clear plan to reconstitute and grow its military, and was expected to succeed in efforts to double its land forces to 1.5 million by 2026. 'They are recruiting significantly more personnel than they need as replacements for the war in Ukraine. They are producing surplus stocks of ammunition, in particular, which they are 'putting on store'.' Maj-Gen Freuding said Russia was also ramping up its military infrastructure, especially in its western military district bordering new Nato member Finland. Any ceasefire in Ukraine could allow Russia to accelerate its rearmament efforts ahead of a possible large-scale attack on Nato territory, he said. The alliance currently believes this could occur from 2029. 'Of course, a ceasefire could change the threat situation,' Maj-Gen Freuding said. Russia denies planning to attack Nato and says it is waging a "special military operation" in Ukraine to protect its own security against what it casts as an aggressive, hostile West. Germany has provided a total of €38 billion (S$55 billion) in military aid to Ukraine, including funds earmarked for the coming years, making it the second largest donor after the United States, the defence ministry in Berlin says. Maj-Gen Freuding said he was not aware of the Trump administration having endorsed any US arms deliveries to Kyiv paid for by third countries. Still, making up for certain crucial parts of US military support to Ukraine would pose significant challenges to Europe. Listing capabilities that would be hard for Europeans to replace, Maj-Gen Freuding cited US intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) data, air defence systems like Patriot and spare parts for US weapons. "If we are capable of replacing specific (ISR) capabilities to a sufficient extent - we need to look into this when we definitely know the Americans won't provide this data anymore." Ukraine uses US intelligence data to help its air defence, and analysts say also for targeting. REUTERS Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Yahoo
07-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Operation Spider's Web: Germany estimates that Ukraine damaged 10% of Russian strategic aircraft
Ukraine's drone attack on Russian airfields on 1 June probably damaged about 10% of Russia's strategic bomber fleet, German Major General Christian Freuding has said. Source: Freuding in a podcast, as reported by European Pravda, citing Reuters Quote: "According to our assessment, more than a dozen aircraft were damaged, TU-95 and TU-22 strategic bombers as well as A-50 surveillance planes." Details: According to the general, who coordinates Berlin's military assistance to Kyiv and works closely with the Ukrainian Defence Ministry, the A-50s, which have a similar function to NATO's AWACS aircraft in providing air surveillance, were probably not in working order. "We believe that they can no longer be used for spare parts. This is a loss, as only a handful of these aircraft exist," he said. "As for the long-range bomber fleet, 10% of it has been damaged in the attack according to our assessment," Freuding added. The United States estimates that the daring Ukrainian drone attack hit up to 20 Russian warplanes, destroying about 10 of them, two US officials told Reuters. Experts say it will take Moscow years to replace the affected aircraft. Despite the losses, Freuding sees no immediate reduction in Russian strikes on Ukraine, noting that Moscow still retains 90% of its strategic bombers, which can launch ballistic and cruise missiles in addition to dropping bombs. "But there is, of course, an indirect effect as the remaining planes will need to fly more sorties, meaning they will be worn out faster, and, most importantly, there is a huge psychological impact," he said. Freuding said that Russia felt secure in its vast territory, which also explains why the aircraft were not well protected. "After this successful operation, this no longer holds true. Russia will need to ramp up the security measures," the general said. Background: On 1 June 2025, the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) carried out a special operation codenamed Pavutyna ("Spider's Web"), hitting Russian strategic jets at four airfields. SSU head Vasyl Maliuk stated that 34% of strategic cruise missile carriers at Russia's main airfields had been destroyed. The SSU said the estimated cost of the equipment destroyed as a result of Operation Spider's Web is over US$7 billion. A senior NATO official called the operation the most successful one yet. The Alliance estimated that at least 40 aircraft were damaged. Between 10 and 13 aircraft were completely destroyed. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has emphasised that the security services used exclusively Ukrainian weapons in this operation and did not use equipment from allied warehouses. Support Ukrainska Pravda on Patreon!
&w=3840&q=100)
First Post
07-06-2025
- Politics
- First Post
Ukrainian drone strike damages 10% of Russia's strategic bomber fleet: German official
The United States estimates that Ukraine's audacious drone attack hit as many as 20 Russian warplanes, destroying around 10 of them, according to two US officials read more A satellite image shows destroyed TU 95 aircrafts in the aftermath of a drone strike at the Belaya air base, Irkutsk region, Russia. File image/ Reuters A Ukrainian drone attack last weekend likely damaged around 10% of Russia's strategic bomber fleet and hit some of the aircraft as they were being prepared for strikes on Ukraine, a senior German military official said. 'According to our assessment, more than a dozen aircraft were damaged, TU-95 and TU-22 strategic bombers as well as A-50 surveillance planes,' German Major General Christian Freuding said in a YouTube podcast reviewed by Reuters ahead of its publication later on Saturday. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD The affected A-50s, which function similarly to NATO's AWACS planes by providing aerial situational awareness, were likely non-operational when they were hit, said the general who coordinates Berlin's military aid to Kyiv and is in close touch with the Ukrainian defence ministry. 'We believe that they can no longer be used for spare parts. This is a loss, as only a handful of these aircraft exist,' he said. 'As for the long-range bomber fleet, 10% of it has been damaged in the attack according to our assessment.' The United States estimates that Ukraine's audacious drone attack hit as many as 20 Russian warplanes, destroying around 10 of them, two U.S. officials told Reuters, and experts say Moscow will take years to replace the affected planes. Despite the losses, Freuding does not see any immediate reduction of Russian strikes against Ukraine, noting that Moscow still retains 90% of its strategic bombers which can launch ballistic and cruise missiles in addition to dropping bombs. 'But there is, of course, an indirect effect as the remaining planes will need to fly more sorties, meaning they will be worn out faster, and, most importantly, there is a huge psychological impact.' Freuding said Russia had felt safe in its vast territory, which also explained why there was little protection for the aircraft. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD 'After this successful operation, this no longer holds true. Russia will need to ramp up the security measures.' According to Freuding, Ukraine attacked two air fields around 100 kilometres (62 miles) from Moscow, as well as the Olenya air field in the Murmansk region and the Belaya air field, with drones trained with the help of artificial intelligence. A fifth attack on the Ukrainka air field near the Chinese border failed, he said. The bombers that were hit were part of Russia's so-called nuclear triad which enables nuclear weapons deployment by air, sea and ground, he added.
The Sun
07-06-2025
- Politics
- The Sun
Ukraine drone strike hits 10% of Russia's bomber fleet
BERLIN: A Ukrainian drone attack last weekend likely damaged around 10% of Russia's strategic bomber fleet and hit some of the aircraft as they were being prepared for strikes on Ukraine, a senior German military official said. 'According to our assessment, more than a dozen aircraft were damaged, TU-95 and TU-22 strategic bombers as well as A-50 surveillance planes,' German Major General Christian Freuding said in a YouTube podcast reviewed by Reuters ahead of its publication later on Saturday. The affected A-50s, which function similarly to NATO's AWACS planes by providing aerial situational awareness, were likely non-operational when they were hit, said the general who coordinates Berlin's military aid to Kyiv and is in close touch with the Ukrainian defence ministry. 'We believe that they can no longer be used for spare parts. This is a loss, as only a handful of these aircraft exist,' he said. 'As for the long-range bomber fleet, 10% of it has been damaged in the attack according to our assessment.' The United States estimates that Ukraine's audacious drone attack hit as many as 20 Russian warplanes, destroying around 10 of them, two U.S. officials told Reuters, and experts say Moscow will take years to replace the affected planes. Despite the losses, Freuding does not see any immediate reduction of Russian strikes against Ukraine, noting that Moscow still retains 90% of its strategic bombers which can launch ballistic and cruise missiles in addition to dropping bombs. 'But there is, of course, an indirect effect as the remaining planes will need to fly more sorties, meaning they will be worn out faster, and, most importantly, there is a huge psychological impact.' Freuding said Russia had felt safe in its vast territory, which also explained why there was little protection for the aircraft. 'After this successful operation, this no longer holds true. Russia will need to ramp up the security measures.' According to Freuding, Ukraine attacked two air fields around 100 kilometres (62 miles) from Moscow, as well as the Olenya air field in the Murmansk region and the Belaya air field, with drones trained with the help of artificial intelligence. A fifth attack on the Ukrainka air field near the Chinese border failed, he said. The bombers that were hit were part of Russia's so-called nuclear triad which enables nuclear weapons deployment by air, sea and ground, he added.
