by Michael Hollister
German version published at apolut media on June 30, 2026

4.440 words * 23 minutes readingtime

The Shelter Germany Is Leaving – Part 2: The Consequences

Four levels of entanglement-and a threshold under international law that no one names.

On 13 February 2026, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stood in a factory hall in Gauting, Bavaria, and received a drone. It was no symbolic gesture. The aircraft, a model called LINZA, was the first drone of Ukrainian design to be manufactured entirely in series production on German soil-produced by the German-Ukrainian joint venture Quantum Frontline Industries, a partnership between the Bavarian manufacturer Quantum Systems and the Ukrainian firm Frontline Robotics. In October 2025, both sides had signed a memorandum within the framework of the Ukraine Contact Group; in December they announced the joint venture; and barely two months later, the first series was already rolling off the line. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who attended the handover, spoke of lightspeed. The declared objective of the plant is to manufacture up to 10,000 drones per year and deliver one hundred percent of them to the Ukrainian armed forces. The handover took place ahead of the Munich Security Conference-a deliberately chosen setting that made the step legible as both an industrial and a political signal. What had begun in December as a declaration of intent had become physical reality within a matter of weeks: a production line that a foreign head of state personally came to inspect.

The LINZA itself is not a long-range strike weapon. It is a combat-proven multipurpose drone with a twelve-inch frame that carries up to roughly 9 lbs of payload over a few miles and stays airborne for about an hour-built for the close range of the front, not for strikes into the depth. What matters, therefore, is not the device but the location. Here, on German industrial ground, war materiel rolls off the line that is destined not for Germany’s own army but for an actively belligerent state-handed over in a public ceremony to its president, in the presence of the German defense minister. Pistorius expressly noted that not only Ukraine stood to benefit from this model, but Germany as well. It is precisely this sentence that marks a question almost entirely absent from the German rearmament debate.

The Question That Is Barely Asked

That question is not: Is Russia’s attack on Ukraine legitimate? Nor is it whether Germany is permitted to support Ukraine.

The real question is narrower and more uncomfortable. Is Germany, through the nature and depth of its entanglement, moving out of the protective shelter that prevailing legal doctrine still grants it as a non-belligerent-toward a threshold whose exact location international law itself does not clearly define? And if so: Why is this threshold seriously debated neither in the Bundestag nor in the broader public sphere?

It is a question addressed to Berlin, not to Moscow. It does not presuppose that Russia would be justified in attacking German sites. It asks whether the Federal Republic is aware of its own movement-and whether it knows the consequences it would have to declare possible, not certain. The path to this threshold can be traced across four levels: from political alignment through money, weapons, and training to production on German soil, and finally to the conversion of civilian industry. Each of these levels can appear justifiable on its own terms. Taken together, they form a picture that the individual justifications can no longer capture.

Level One: Politics

The first level is political-the oldest and the least contested. Germany carries the European Union’s sanctions architecture against Russia across what are now more than a dozen packages, has downgraded diplomatic relations, and has placed itself rhetorically and unambiguously on Kyiv’s side. The language has shifted in step. Where the early days of the so-called Zeitenwende still spoke of limited assistance, Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared in his government statement the goal of building the Bundeswehr into the conventionally strongest army in Europe, citing Germany’s size and economic strength as well as the expectations of its allies.

The former chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael Roth, distilled the logic of this level: Germany’s security and freedom were currently being defended in Ukraine and along NATO’s eastern flank as well. At this level, Germany remains squarely within the bounds of what states have always done in the conflicts of others: take a position, apply pressure, tend alliances. Political alignment does not make a state a party to the conflict. Anyone who suspected a threshold here would have to declare half the world a conflict party. The political level is therefore not a border crossing-it is the foundation on which the following three levels rest in the first place, and it imperceptibly shifts the standard of what counts as self-evident. This shifted standard is itself part of the finding. A delivery of heavy weapons that was debated for weeks in 2022 is a footnote in 2026; the announcement of joint arms production runs as business news. Not because international law has changed, but because public attention trails the escalation of its own levels.

Level Two: Weapons, Money, Training

The second level is material. Since the start of the Russian invasion, Germany has provided Ukraine with approximately 39 billion euros in civilian assistance; in the military domain, support totals approximately 55 billion euros. For the year 2026 alone, the German government is allocating 11.5 billion euros for Ukraine’s defensive fight, making it, by its own account, the country’s strongest supporter. Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov put the German share at roughly one-third of all international aid.

What matters is not only the scale but the quality. On 11 May 2026, Pistorius and Fedorov signed in Kyiv the “Brave Germany” agreement, a joint program for the development of defense technologies. Part of a simultaneously announced four-billion-euro package is a 300-million-euro investment in Ukrainian so-called deep-strike capabilities-weapons that can hit targets deep inside Russian territory-as well as the joint production of an initial 5,000 AI-guided medium-range drones. Added to this are several hundred Patriot guided missiles and 36 IRIS-T launchers. Fedorov called such capabilities Kyiv’s “long-range sanctions.” What he meant were strikes against logistics, refineries, and arms facilities far behind the front-a category of weapons with which the Ukrainian armed forces have recently inflicted significant damage on Russia’s petroleum infrastructure. When a state finances the development and procurement of such capabilities, it is no longer merely supporting the defense against an attack but rather the capacity for counter-offensive operations on the attacker’s territory. Notably, part of this materiel is manufactured at a specific location: the Patriot interceptor missiles of the GEM-T type are produced, among other places, in Schrobenhausen, Bavaria-the same site also known for the Taurus cruise missile. Germany’s role thereby shifts from supplier of defensive means to financier and co-producer of capabilities whose express purpose is the attack on Russian territory. This, too, remains covered by the prevailing doctrine under Ukraine’s right of self-defense. But the movement away from purely defensive support is unmistakable.

Level Three: Production on German Soil

The third level is the most consequential in qualitative terms, and here it is worth distinguishing two processes that blur together in public perception. The first is the LINZA production by Quantum Frontline Industries near Munich, already described above: short range, high volume, symbolically charged, militarily limited. Alongside the LINZA, the joint venture is planning additional models, including variants for reconnaissance and an armed model. Quantum Systems itself, which has been supplying Ukraine with reconnaissance drones since 2022, was valued at three billion euros following a funding round in late 2025 and has established its own defense subsidiary, Stark Defence.

The second process is of a different magnitude. During government consultations in Berlin, Zelensky and Merz signed on 14 April 2026 a contract with the German-Ukrainian joint venture Auterion Airlogix. The Ukrainian firm Airlogix contributes platforms tested in the most intensive drone war of the present day; the German software company Auterion contributes AI guidance for autonomous navigation and electronic resilience. Going forward, thousands of autonomous drones per year are to be manufactured in Germany-devices that function without satellite navigation and are therefore resistant to electronic jamming, immediately integrable into NATO command structures. It is the first German serial production contract for autonomous systems of this class. Unlike the LINZA, these drones reach ranges of up to roughly 930 miles and are thus designed for strikes deep inside Russia. Initially, the systems go exclusively to Ukraine; in a second step, according to the declared plan, the Bundeswehr could receive identical devices. The contractual framework expressly provides that other NATO partners may also benefit from the production line. What began as a bilateral aid project is thus becoming the nucleus of a European defense structure.

This means that on German soil, an industrial capacity is being created that supplies an actively belligerent state with long-range weapons-weapons with which that state attacks the territory of its adversary. The Munich-based manufacturer Quantum Systems concluded two additional joint ventures with Ukrainian firms on the sidelines of the same consultations, including one for the production of interceptor drones with ground control stations. The German drone industry, which only a few years ago occupied a niche, has within a short time become a center of European arms production for Ukraine.

What is remarkable is the openly stated rationale for the relocation. One of the principal reasons for moving production to Germany, according to research by the news service German Foreign Policy, lies expressly in the fact that German sites are considered safe from Russian attacks-while factories in Ukraine, due to the war, are not. It is precisely this assumption of safety that makes Level Three the real analytical breaking point. It presupposes that the shelter holds. Whether it holds is the question no one asks aloud-and the one the second part of this analysis will take up.

Level Four: The Conversion of Civilian Industry

The fourth level leaves the narrower defense sector and reaches into the industrial heart of the Federal Republic. Several classic automotive plants are currently being evaluated or converted for military production-a process the industry soberly calls conversion, the repurposing of an industrial branch. Precision is called for here, because the situation has shifted in recent weeks.

In Ludwigsfelde, Brandenburg, the Franco-German tank manufacturer KNDS is negotiating with Mercedes-Benz over the local van plant, where approximately 2,000 employees currently produce the Sprinter. Mercedes intends to relocate this production to Jawor, Poland, by the end of the decade; KNDS is considering taking over a large portion of the site or initially leasing parts of it, investing roughly one billion euros there, and eventually running the Boxer armored vehicle off the line instead of the Sprinter. During a transitional phase, military and civilian production could run in parallel. This step is embedded in a noteworthy ownership structure: as part of the initial public offering planned for the summer of 2026 in Frankfurt and Paris, the state development bank KfW is to acquire a 40 percent stake in KNDS, thereby matching the French state. Mercedes CEO Ola Källenius simultaneously emphasizes that the defense business remains a secondary division for his corporation-a signal of restraint that nonetheless does not obscure the direction.

At the VW plant in Osnabrück, where convertible production expires in 2027 and roughly 2,300 people work, the constellation has shifted. Rheinmetall had previously declined a takeover; KNDS has dropped out as a prospective buyer. Instead, the Israeli defense firm Rafael signed a letter of intent in April 2026: components for an air defense system could in the future be produced in Osnabrück. Volkswagen itself has already presented two military vehicle studies under the brand “D.E.S. Defence,” designed as modular platforms for medical, drone, and logistics applications. An important qualification: in none of these cases is the issue that Volkswagen or Mercedes would become munitions factories. The issue is vehicles, components, and factory halls-conversion, not the transformation of civilian corporations into arms forges. The precedent already set lies in Görlitz, Saxony, where KNDS acquired a former plant of the rail vehicle manufacturer Alstom in 2025; of approximately 700 remaining positions, the corporation secured about 580 there.

This level is the most diffuse, and it deserves the greatest terminological caution. Much remains at the stage of evaluation, exploration, and letters of intent; much could still fall through, as the experience in Görlitz shows, where many months passed between announcement and execution. To remain in the subjunctive here is not a figure of speech but an obligation. Yet the trend is unmistakable: civilian industry is losing substance while the defense sector absorbs freed-up capacity. The German Association of the Automotive Industry projects the loss of up to 225,000 jobs by 2035-an economic undertow that makes conversion attractive regardless of any strategic intent. A particular irony lies in the location: it is in the Osnabrück of the Peace of Westphalia, a city that calls itself the “City of Peace,” where military production could be expanded-a contradiction that local initiatives have marked with the slogan “Kriegstüchtig? Not with us!” The four levels thus differ not only in degree but in the quality of their binding force. Politics can be reversed; deliveries can be stopped. A production line into which a billion euros has flowed and on which thousands of jobs depend develops a momentum that largely eludes political control.

Between Neutrality and Belligerency

With this, the finding at the factual level is outlined. The question it raises under international law is old and at the same time unresolved. Classical neutrality law, codified in the Hague Conventions, knew a sharp dividing line: whoever supplied war materiel to a party to a conflict lost its neutral status and could itself become a party. But that law dates from an era in which war was considered a legitimate instrument of interstate politics. With the Charter of the United Nations, the foundation shifted. The prohibition on the use of force in Article 2 fundamentally forbids interstate violence; what remains permissible under Article 51 is solely defense against an armed attack. The principle ex iniuria ius non oritur-no right arises from wrongdoing-operates here in the Federal Republic’s favor: Russia’s unlawful attack does not create a right for Russia to in turn attack Ukraine’s supporters.

The official German position, built on this foundation, is internally coherent and deserves to be rendered fairly and in full. Former Federal Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann articulated it clearly: Germany would only become a party to the conflict if it actively intervened in the hostilities-for instance, if uniformed German soldiers fought alongside Ukrainian ones. The mere delivery of weapons to a state exercising its legitimate right of self-defense did not make anyone a conflict party; in a Bundestag question session, he called this simply legally clear. In a later interview, Buschmann went a step further and expressly included production: in no case would-in his view-the suppliers of the weapons or the countries in which they were manufactured become a party to the conflict, even if Ukraine used them to attack targets in Russia. Michael Roth affirmed that this was the legal position of the entire federal government; arms deliveries and the training of Ukrainian soldiers on German soil did not make Germany a conflict party. Whoever claimed the opposite, Buschmann argued in essence, was applying a version of international law from a hundred years ago.

This position is the prevailing doctrine. It is not the construct of a government retroactively justifying its policy but reflects the predominant state of international legal scholarship. Anyone who views Germany’s movement critically must withstand this position and take it seriously-otherwise they are merely producing the mirror image of the journalism they purport to criticize.

The Breaking Point That the Establishment Itself Identifies

And yet this prevailing doctrine has a seam, made visible not by Moscow but by German institutions themselves. The Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), the Federal Republic’s most important foreign policy think tank, exposed precisely this seam in an analysis by the international law scholar Christian Schaller. The German government, the analysis states, supports Ukraine in exercising its individual right of self-defense without thereby becoming a party to the conflict. Yet from the perspective of international law, the question arises when support in an armed conflict tips over into an indirect use of force. Beyond that point, the collective right of self-defense would have to be invoked-and one could hardly continue to claim non-belligerent status. The decisive admission: neither the prohibition on the use of force nor international humanitarian law provides a clear answer as to when this threshold is crossed. Schaller captured the situation in an image that could hardly be more apt: “driving by sight”-including where international law is concerned.

This ambiguity is not the invention of Kremlin-adjacent voices. It is also found in the legal opinion of the Bundestag’s Parliamentary Research Service, to which Roth referred in his own response. There it states, in the subjunctive, that only if the training and instruction in the use of weapons were added to the supply of weapons would one leave the secure zone of non-belligerency. The Bochum international law scholar Pierre Thielbörger formulated the matter with similar caution: arms deliveries alone were not yet an act of war; the situation could be different with advisory services-what remained decisive was a case-by-case assessment. Three sources, all German, all established, all arriving at the same finding: there is a secure zone, there is a threshold, and there is no sharp line separating the two.

That is the core. None of those cited claims that Germany has crossed the threshold. But all concede that a threshold exists whose location is indeterminate-and about which the national discourse falls silent while the four levels stack upon one another month after month. The training that the Bundestag’s legal opinion names as a potential tipping point has long been underway; the production that Buschmann expressly declares harmless has reached a dimension the author of that opinion could scarcely have envisioned in 2022. Added to this is a temporal finding: the authoritative opinions and interviews on which the reassurance rests date predominantly from 2022 and 2023-a phase in which Germany was delivering weapons but not yet producing them, in which there was no talk of deep-strike financing or serial production of autonomous attack drones on German soil. The legal situation is being defended with arguments whose factual foundation has long been overtaken by Levels Three and Four.

The Logic of Power: Who Benefits from the Silence

The question cui bono-who benefits-does not lead here to a conspiracy but to an observation about the structure of the debate. The entanglement across Levels Two through Four generates interests that make questioning the threshold uncomfortable. A struggling automotive industry seeks to keep plants running whose civilian future is ending; defense corporations like KNDS, Rheinmetall, or Rafael seek capacity for full order books; the federal government seeks industrial sovereignty and a visible contribution to European defense. When the state, through the KfW, itself becomes a major shareholder of a tank manufacturer, the line between regulator and interested party blurs as well. The scale of it explains the pull. The Ministry of Defense plans to procure on the order of 400 billion euros in the coming years-a market whose mere anticipation shifts the strategic orientation of entire corporations long before the first order is signed. For a struggling automotive industry that stands to lose hundreds of thousands of jobs by 2035, defense is not primarily a political but a business decision. This is precisely what makes the conversion so difficult to reverse: it is driven not by ideology but by order books. In this constellation, hardly any relevant actor has an interest in asking aloud whether the safety assumption underlying the German shelter holds.

Here a fallacy common in critical reporting must be avoided: from the fact that a debate is uncomfortable and surrounded by interests, it does not follow that the official position is wrong. The prevailing doctrine could prove entirely correct, and Germany might never become a target. The logic of power does not explain why the official position would be incorrect-it only explains why the question about the threshold is so rarely asked. What is noteworthy in this context is the climate surrounding the arms conversion. In Osnabrück, state security services investigated an anti-militarist initiative that had criticized the defense minister; at a staff assembly, employees were instructed not to speak with activists or the press. This is a finding, not a verdict-but it belongs in the picture of a debate that is being closed inward rather than opened, while outward every level appears as though there were no alternative.

A Historical Anomaly

Above all of it lies a circumstance rarely recalled in day-to-day politics: the Second World War never ended for Germany with a classical peace treaty. In its place came the Two-Plus-Four Treaty of 1990, in its full title a “Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany”-legally a settlement, not a peace treaty in the traditional sense. Signed on 12 September 1990 in Moscow by the two German states and the four victorious powers, entering into force on 15 March 1991, it established the definitive internal and external sovereignty of a unified Germany and simultaneously tied it to conditions.

Two of those conditions are of particular significance today, and they stand-contrary to occasional oversimplification-in different articles. In Article 2, the German governments affirm their declaration that only peace shall emanate from German soil; actions undertaken with the purpose and intent of disturbing the peaceful coexistence of nations, in particular the preparation of a war of aggression, are unconstitutional and punishable under the constitution of a unified Germany. In Article 3, Germany renounces the manufacture, possession, and control of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and commits to reducing its armed forces to 370,000 soldiers. The preamble, signed by Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Lothar de Maizière for the two German states and the foreign ministers of the four powers, embeds both in the promise of a lasting European peace order.

Here the utmost precision is needed to avoid creating a false impression. Germany is not itself waging a war of aggression. It does not breach the letter of Article 2 by supporting Ukraine-the delivery of weapons to a state defending itself is not a war of aggression, and no serious jurist claims otherwise. What does arise, however, is a tension between the spirit of a treaty that aimed for “only peace” from German soil and a German soil that today produces weapons for an active war-and to whose sites the assumption is attached that they are safe. This tension is not a breach of law. It is an anomaly that deserves to be named-and it is at the same time the bridge to what follows.

For the Two-Plus-Four Treaty is not merely a German self-commitment. It is the basis of the bargain on which the reassurance rests that Germany is and will remain safe. What would happen if a treaty partner called this basis into question? If the shelter whose continued existence Level Three silently presupposes turned out to be less solid than the official position assumes? These are the questions of Part Two-not as prediction but as a thinking-through of the possible, in the subjunctive and with attributed positions.

Conclusion

The finding of this first part is sober and can be captured in a single sentence: Germany is moving, across four levels, out of a shelter whose boundary international law itself does not know-and it is doing so without so much as looking for that boundary. The official position may prove correct; the threshold may remain distant. But a society that produces weapons for a war while trusting that it will remain untouched by that war owes itself at least the question of what this trust actually rests on. Part 2 will think this question through-not to issue a threat, but to illuminate what options Germany’s movement could open for others and what price a society pays that would rather not hear the answer. It is not the movement that is unsettling, but the silence about where it leads.

German version published at apolut.net on June 30, 2026

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About the Author

Michael Hollister
is a geopolitical analyst and investigative journalist. He served six years in the German military, including peacekeeping deployments in the Balkans (SFOR, KFOR), followed by 14 years in IT security management. His analysis draws on primary sources to examine European militarization, Western intervention policy, and shifting power dynamics across Asia. A particular focus of his work lies in Southeast Asia, where he investigates strategic dependencies, spheres of influence, and security architectures. Hollister combines operational insider perspective with uncompromising systemic critique – beyond opinion journalism. His work appears on his bilingual website (German/English) www.michael-hollister.com and in investigative outlets across the German-speaking world and the Anglosphere.

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