March 09, 2015 "ICH" - "RPI" - What happens when a close friend starts acting so bizarrely that you need to gently extract yourself from his ravings lest you be tarred with the same brush -- or worse? That is the position in which Germany is increasingly finding itself, as the US government's strange pronouncements about Ukraine are getting too much to bear. The German establishment magazine Der Spiegel has just published a very important article, "Breedlove's Bellicosity: Berlin Alarmed by Aggressive NATO Stance on Ukraine," that lifts the lid on what official Germany really thinks about the US neocon push to war with Russia over Ukraine.

Der Spiegel starts by recalling an event last Wednesday. It was a time when the "Minsk II" ceasefire agreement had produced relative calm throughout eastern Ukraine. The weaponry was being withdrawn and an encouraging, if imperfect, ceasefire was holding. The deal, brokered personally by the German, French, Russian, and Ukrainian leadership, was producing results. Yet on that very day, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander for Europe (SACEUR), the American General Philip Breedlove, was spinning a completely different yarn.

As the magazine reports:

On that same day, General Philip Breedlove, the top NATO commander in Europe, stepped before the press in Washington. Putin, the 59-year-old said, had once again 'upped the ante' in eastern Ukraine -- with 'well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery' having been sent to the Donbass. 'What is clear,' Breedlove said, 'is that right now, it is not getting better. It is getting worse every day.'

[F]or months now, many in the Chancellery simply shake their heads each time NATO, under Breedlove's leadership, goes public with striking announcements about Russian troop or tank movements. ... False claims and exaggerated accounts, warned a top German official during a recent meeting on Ukraine, have put NATO — and by extension, the entire West — in danger of losing its credibility.

...senior officials in Berlin immediately asked the BND for an assessment, but the intelligence agency's satellite images showed just a few armored vehicles.

Even those American intelligence officials who supply the BND with daily situation reports were much more reserved about the incident than Hodges was in his public statements. One intelligence agent says it 'remains a riddle until today' how the general reached his conclusions.

While talking to the Europeans this weekend, you need to make the case that Russia is putting in more and more offensive stuff while we want to help the Ukrainians defend against these systems...