A risk-averse Germany enters an age of confrontation

VLADIMIR PUTIN’S war feels close in Berlin. Take the escalator in the (main train station) down one level, cross the floor and you find its victims: hundreds of refugees seeking a room for the night or a ticket for onward travel. On some days over 10,000 Ukrainians reach Germany’s capital. Reception centres are struggling. But the volunteers swarming the concourse have been heroic. The extent of their organisation is “almost shocking”, beams Zeren Yildirim, a volunteer with the International Rescue Committee.No less shocking has been the foreign-policy switch engineered just across the river Spree in Germany’s chancellery. On February 27th Olaf Scholz delivered a speech to the Bundestag that will be recalled as one of the defining moments of his still-young chancellorship. Mr Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine marked a (“turning-point,” or “watershed”), Mr Scholz said. The term has come to stand for what may become one of the biggest ruptures in German foreign and security policy since the second world war.