Angela Merkel has said she does not regret her administration of Vladimir Putin during her time in power, arguing that the Russian president has perceived a 2008 NATO membership plan for Ukraine that was blocked by his government as a “declaration of war.”
The former German chancellor also claimed that an oligarchic-led and democratically immature Ukraine would have been less prepared for an invasion then than now.
“I would feel really bad if I had said,‘ It doesn’t make sense to talk to this man [Putin]Merkel said in an interview on stage at the Berliner Ensemble on Tuesday night, her first public appearance since leaving office half a year ago.
“It’s a great tragedy that didn’t work, but I don’t blame myself for trying,” he added in an unusually blunt response from a politician who rarely spoke freely while in office.
Asked if she regretted opposing the US-led accession action plan for Ukraine and Georgia in 2008, Merkel said: “Ukraine was not the country we know now. It was a very divided Ukraine. .. even the reformist forces [Yulia] Tymoshenko i [Viktor] Yushchenko strongly disagreed. This means that it was not a country whose democracy was strengthened internally. “He said that Ukraine at that time was” ruled by oligarchs. “
From the Russian president’s point of view, “it was a declaration of war.” Although she did not share Putin’s perspective, Merkel said she “knew how to think” and “didn’t want to provoke him anymore.”
He claimed to have blocked Ukraine’s path to membership in the military alliance with the best interests of the country. “You can’t be a NATO member overnight,” Merkel said. “It’s a process, and during that process I knew Putin would have done something wrong in Ukraine that would not have been good for him.”
The Minsk Accords of 2014 and 2015 were signed by then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to reach a political agreement in eastern Ukraine, but have since been criticized for forcing concessions while the country was in power. militarily on his back.
Merkel defended the agreements, saying they bought time in Ukraine. “It calmed the issue and gave Ukraine time to become the country it has become now.”
He praised President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for his wartime leadership, saying he represented a new Ukraine.
Interview with Der Spiegel journalist Alexander Osang began with Merkel talking about how she had spent her first few weeks out of the office taking solitary walks on the Baltic Sea, wearing a hooded sweatshirt so as not to be recognized by passers-by, and listening to a William Shakespeare’s Macbeth audiobook.
But the conversation inevitably turned to the war in Ukraine and whether Germany’s alleged indulgence towards the Kremlin had emboldened Putin. Merkel said she felt the geopolitical problems created by the collapse of the Soviet Union had been present during her 16 years in power. “It was not possible to end the Cold War properly … the question of Russia always remained.”
Merkel said she had begun to take seriously the possibility of an impending invasion in her last weeks in office, when she attended the G20 summit in Rome while Olaf Scholz’s successor government was still in the process of formation.
“There were clues and we talked about it a lot,” the 67-year-old said. “I realized that Putin had ended the Minsk process.”
While Merkel condemned Russia’s war of aggression in clear terms, it also seemed to suggest that some blame should be spread to the west.
“What happened is a big mistake on the part of Russia … an objective break with all the rules of international law that allow us to live in peace in Europe. If we start spending one century after another arguing over which territory belongs to whom, then we would be at war non-stop.
“I do not share Mr. Putin’s opinion, to make it very clear. But we failed to create a security architecture that could prevent it. [war in Ukraine]. And we have to think about it, too. “
He rejected criticism that Germany, under his leadership, had fallen in love with the illusion that a militarily aggressive Russia could be democratized by expanding trade ties with the West.
“I didn’t think Putin could be changed through trade,” Merkel said. But he said his belief was that if political co-operation was impossible, it was reasonable to have at least some economic connections with Moscow.
Merkel’s defense of expanding economic ties with Russia seemed to disagree with her claim to have warned other politicians that Putin was anxious about the whole Western model of democracy and wanted to “destroy Europe.”
The former leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) admitted that European countries had not spent enough on their armies, although he rejected criticism that the German army had fallen into chaos under his surveillance.
“What should we have applied more strongly?” he asked rhetorically when reviewing the decisions of his last two terms. “It simply came to our notice then [the military] it is the only language Putin understands. He saw that we, and not only Germany but also others, no longer had the power to attack the Cold War. “