As a Ukrainian historian who has lived in Germany for a decade, Andrii Portnov has watched his adopted country with mixed emotions over the past 11 months.
He could see how far Germany had come, he said, in the tumultuous period since Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of his home nation. Berlin, which this time a year ago refused to send weapons into a war zone, is now the third-largest supplier of military aid to Ukraine. This week it announced that it would dispatch Leopard 2 modern battle tanks, shattering the latest in a long line of national taboos.