AGI Who would have thought just a few months ago that Angela Merkel would one day fight to defend her legacy? Who would have thought that the image that will go down in history, its icon, would be threatened by the ghosts of relations with Moscow? From an often glorified past that also consisted of hundreds of phone calls and meetings with Vladimir Putin to keep alive the dialogue with the Kremlin, the cornerstone of German multipolarity in recent decades? Today, in the face of the gruesome images pouring in from Bucha, while Russian bombs continue to fall on Ukrainian cities and the civilian death toll is in the triple digits, it’s getting louder in Germany, in Ukraine, in Poland, in the world. the rumors that questioning Federal Republican foreign policy for at least two decades.
The most recent controversies are Germany’s no to Ukraine’s NATO accession in 2008 by Merkel and the launch of the megagas pipeline Nord Stream 2, which the former chancellor defended to the last but which ultimately belongs to his successor Olaf Scholz, who had to hastily “freeze” it. Also controversial was Federal President FrankWalter Steinmeier, head of the Chancellery in the days of Gerhard Schröder (today leading manager on the boards of Rosneft, Nord Stream and Gazprom) and twotime foreign minister of the Merkel governments. In short: the entire tracing of German Ostpolitik from the fall of the Wall to the present day is in the dock Attempt to “build bridges” with Moscow. in the name of a “European security architecture” that also includes Moscow.
Even the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung a newspaper traditionally close to the chancellor had the headline yesterday in block capitals “Merkel’s strategic mistake“, with a view to the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest: According to the Faz, it was a “wrong calculation” that contributed to today’s war catastrophes: Germany and France prevented it out of consideration for Russia”. was “the worst of all solutions”, the newspaper says: “Had Ukraine been welcomed, Putin would never have dared to attack, and if membership had not been envisaged, at least this pretext for an attack would have failed.” In practice, the Bucharest decision has “created a strategic no man’s land from which Putin has been cutting out individual pieces for 14 years”. Definitely, the Faz clipped, “it wasn’t a masterpiece of Western diplomacy.”
Merkel’s comment
This is the first time the former chancellor has struck herself in weeks: with an official note published by her spokeswoman Merkel has announced that she will stick to her decision at the time. The note adds that “given the horrors that are visible in Bucha and elsewhere in Ukraine, all efforts by the federal government and the international community to stand by Ukraine and work to end the barbarism and war in Russia are their… find full support”. It is difficult to argue that this is enough. Already the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj had reiterated his sharp criticism of Germany, who had spoken of an “absurd fear of some politicians of Russia” because of which there was a revolution in the Ukraine, eight years of blood in the Donbass and now “the worst conflict in Europe since World War II”.
From there the provocative invitation to Merkel and also to former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, also a protagonist of that fateful summit in 2008: “I invite Ms. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy to visit Bucha to see where the policy of concessions towards Russia is “. Rocky words also from the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki: “Mrs. Chancellor, you have been silent about the monopoly on the sale of your fossil fuels since the beginning of the war”.
Obviously the reference here is to the Germany’s dependence on Russian gas and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which has been vigorously opposed by both the United States and France in recent years, not to mention Ukraine. Finally, yesterday, Steinmeier also declared that “it was a mistake to remain loyal to the project”. A real mea culpa from the President, after days and days of being questioned about his foreign policy decisions towards Moscow. Starting with the Ukrainian ambassador in Berlin, Andriy Melnyk, according to whom the relationship with Moscow is “something fundamental, even sacred” for the German head of state.
Steinmeier’s bitter record
The man from Kyiv then increased the dose and added that since the time of Chancellor Schröder Steinmeier he had “built up a network of contacts in Russia, in which many people are involved who still play an important role in the traffic light government”. Heartbroken, the Federal President admitted his mistakes in newspapers and on television: “We kept bridges alive that Russia no longer believed in and that our partners had repeatedly warned us about.”
And on the invasion of Ukraine, Steinmeier explains: “My assessment was that Putin would not risk the complete economic, political and moral ruin of his country in the name of imperial madness: I was wrong about that, as were others“In short, the tenants of Bellevue Castle are a “bitter balance sheet” when you consider that “we have not succeeded in building a common European house that also includes Russia.” But apparently even that is not enough At least not for the world, whose former director Thomas Schmid devotes a long editorial to Steinmeier’s sins: “She has always stressed the need for dialogue with Moscow, but she has never been clear and unequivocal about the threat posed by Russia warned.
He never begged Europe to defend itself, but appealed for understanding for Putin’s concern that Russia was being aggressively encircled by the West. There was no shortage of alarm bells, all about the “dark side” of relations between Moscow and Berlin. Starting with the hacker attack on the Bundestag in 2015, which Germany says was of Russian origin. And then the case of the murder of a former Georgian militiaman in broad daylight in a park in the German capital, which investigators claim was also concocted by the Russian secret services, an episode that provoked a first expulsion of Russian diplomats from Germany .
As well as It was the Merkel government that bluntly blamed the Kremlin for the poisoning of dissident Aleksei Navalny, brought to the German capital and treated by doctors from the Berlin Charité. A mocking fate, that of the former “Girl from the East: Growing up in the GDR, rising up into politics on the still smoking ruins of the Berlin Wall, for many years was considered the only one who could take on Vladimir Putin, with whom you acted directly in Russian and was proud to have the portrait of Catherine the Great on her desk for years. And today it is forced to see its place in history threatened by a new “Russia Syndrome” thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.