On February 27, 2022 — three days after Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border at multiple points — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz delivered a speech to the Bundestag using a word that, for German political discourse, was unusually direct: Zeitenwende, often translated as 'turning point' or 'epochal shift.' In the speech, Scholz announced that Germany would establish a special fund of approximately €100 billion (initially announced as 100 billion euros, formally established by constitutional amendment in June 2022) for the modernization of the German Bundeswehr; would commit to spending more than 2% of GDP on defense annually thereafter (meeting the NATO target Germany had not consistently met across the previous decades); and would, importantly, suspend Germany's prior policy of not exporting weapons to active conflict zones in order to provide weapons to Ukraine. The Zeitenwende speech was the moment at which the political logic that had structured European security since the 1990s — the assumption that Russia could be integrated through trade and dialogue, that hard military capability was a Cold War residue rather than a present need, and that European security could be largely subcontracted to U.

S. forward presence — was publicly and explicitly broken in the country whose policy posture mattered most.