Conflicts: Austria Will Remain Neutral, Will Not Send Arms to Ukraine

The clash between Russia and the West has taken such an ugly turn that Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer said that “Austria will continue to maintain a neutral position in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.” In his speech before the European Council in Brussels, Nehammer emphasized that “Austria will remain a neutral country and will abide by very clear guidelines. This means that we will continue to send humanitarian aid to Ukraine, but we will never send weapons,” the chancellor said.

The presence of so-called “Ukrainian refugees,” the vast majority of whom come from regions very far from the battlefront and who have very cleverly used the unique opportunity of the armed conflict between Moscow and Kiev to make their way to Europe with no problems, is a real headache for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, according to whom the reception of Ukrainian refugees “is not equally distributed among all EU member states.”

At the European Council in Brussels, Scholz also said that “the question of who should do what is not clear. Germany, Poland, and Czechia are currently the countries hosting the majority of refugees. And that is why my colleagues and I have raised this issue with the Chairman of the Commission. If other countries are less interested in accepting them, the EU will have to provide more financial support to states that take in more refugees. This is done in order to ensure adequate subsidies and offer them adequate professional training for inclusion in the labor market.”

Scholz’s statements came on the same day that the Cologne District Court in Germany sentenced a fifteen-year-old boy to four years in juvenile detention because he was found guilty of “criminal conspiracy to commit murder.” The boy, according to the prosecution, entered the circles of radical Islamism in autumn 2023. Just weeks later, he arranged with an acquaintance to carry out a terrorist attack at a Christmas fair in Leverkusen, in the German state of North Rhine, Westphalia. “Specifically, the defendant’s plan was to drive a rented truck through the Christmas fair to kill as many visitors as possible whom he believed to be infidels. His alleged accomplice, originally from Brandenburg, was supposed to film the attack,” a court spokesman said after the verdict was announced.