Merkel cannot persuade Putin during the Ukraine war

• Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended her approach to Russia before its invasion of Ukraine in February.
• In the summer of 2021, she attempted to arrange meetings between the leaders of France’s Emmanuel Macron and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
• Both she and Mr. Putin have first-hand experience with communist East Germany.

She claimed that in the summer of 2021, she had attempted to arrange meetings between the leaders of France and Russia for a summit on Europe.

She told Spiegel news, “But I didn’t have the power to get my way.

Everyone was aware that she would be leaving in the fall, she claimed.

Mrs. Merkel stepped down as chancellor in December after serving four terms. The feeling was very clear: “In terms of power politics you’re finished,” she told a German news magazine after her last trip to Moscow in August 2021.

“For Putin, only power counts,” she continued.

She noted that it was crucial that Mr. Putin invited Sergei Lavrov to their final meeting. They had previously met one-on-one, she said.

Many have suggested that Mrs. Merkel and other EU leaders should have taken a stronger stance toward the Kremlin in light of President Putin’s invasion, which was preceded by weeks of significant military build-up on Ukraine’s borders.

She was aware that Mr. Putin was attempting to divide and weaken Europe, but she believed “soft power” was the best strategy, according to MP Roderich Kiesewetter of her Christian Democrat (CDU) party. He contended that Germany was overly dependent on Russian gas before to the invasion.

In an interview with Spiegel, Mrs. Merkel said that her stance on Ukraine during the Minsk peace negotiations had given Kiev more time to strengthen its defences against the Russian military.

After Russia’s 2014 invasion of the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine and its proxy war in the Donbas region, a ceasefire agreement was negotiated in Minsk. However, important ideas like disarmament and global oversight were not put into practise.

Because she believed her government was failing to make headway on the Ukraine problem as well as the wars in Moldova, Georgia, Syria, and Libya—all of which implicated Russia—she stated she did not regret leaving office in December.

She grew up there, and Mr. Putin spent time there as a Soviet KGB official conducting covert intelligence operations, so they both had firsthand knowledge of life in communist East Germany. Mrs. Merkel is bilingual in Russian and Mr. Putin is fluent in German.

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