Angela Merkel: “It takes incredible strength to stand up to Russia”

Former Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel has acknowledged her powerlessness before Russian President Vladimir Putin in the last months of her 16-year rule. During her farewell visit to Moscow in August 2021, she had the impression that her political persuasion had run out before the Russian president. “For Putin only force counts,” said Merkel in statements to the weekly ‘Der Spiegel’. The former head of the Berlin Executive also admits that the Minsk agreement, signed in 2014 after the Russian invasion of the Crimean peninsula and the independence rebellion in Donbas to prevent the conflict between Ukraine and Russia from getting out of control, was already “undermined”. in 2021.

Merkel points out that that summer she tried unsuccessfully with French President Emmanuel Macron to organize a meeting between Putin and the European Union. And she acknowledges that “I did not advance an inch. Not only when it comes to Ukraine. Transnistria and Moldova, Georgia and Abkhazia, Syria and Libya », were issues that had to be addressed urgently, but on which the Russian president was already inflexible in his position, as well as inaccessible to his Western interlocutors. The veteran conservative politician stresses that she agreed with former US President Barack Obama when it came to assessing Putin.

“After the annexation of Crimea by Russia, we did everything possible to prevent further Russian attacks on Ukraine from taking place and we agreed on our sanctions in detail,” says Merkel, who in recent weeks has been the subject of numerous criticisms for not having recognized until now no mistake in his policy towards Moscow during his four legislatures at the head of the German Government. For the former federal chancellor, the invasion of Ukraine led by the Russian Army last February and the war that has been taking place on Ukrainian territory since then has ended “a euphoric phase” in history.

“World full of complications”

“Today we find ourselves before a world that is littered with complications”, points out the former president of the Christian Democratic Union, for whom “history does not repeat itself, although I fear that the bosses do. The horror disappears with the witnesses of the time. But the spirit of reconciliation also disappears. In the interview, Merkel expressly praised the resistance of the Ukrainian people, who are enduring the pressure of a much more powerful enemy, but she is opposed to Germany being the first country to supply the invaded country with modern battle tanks, since Russia would take advantage of it for propaganda .

He also expresses his respect for the president of Kazakhstan, Kasim Yomart Tokaev, for publicly expressing that he does not support the war started by Putin and welcoming tens of thousands of Russians who do not want to be recruited to fight in Ukraine. “It takes incredible strength to stand up to Russia,” says Merkel, for whom changes are taking place in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia against Russia. Finally, Merkel warns that one cannot be too ambitious in foreign policy: “We must be careful not to set our bar too high if we do not want that in the end there is no one capable of satisfying our demands.”