Six months after her departure from power in Germany, former Chancellor Angela Merkel reappeared for the first time in a public act on Tuesday night – a televised interview -, where she vindicated her efforts to prevent the situation in Ukraine from reaching its current state, he defended his policy towards Russia and affirmed that he does not blame himself for attempts at a solution, even if they were unsuccessful.
“It’s a great sadness that it didn’t work out, but I don’t blame myself,” Merkel said, referring to the 2015 Minsk accords with Russia woven together with then-French President François Hollande after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war of pro-Russian separatists in Donbass. “I don’t see why I should now say it was wrong, so I won’t apologize,” said the former chancellor, who wondered if “the tragedy” of the current war could have been avoided.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the former chancellor has been criticized for her policy towards Russia, and the interview ended up dominated by this question, including Merkel’s recollections of her conversations with Vladimir Putin throughout his 16 years as chancellor of Germany. The interview, conducted by Der Spiegel journalist Alexander Osang, was held at the Berliner Ensemble theater in Berlin, organized by the Aufbau publishing house, and was televised by the public broadcaster ARD.
Merkel summed up her policy as a combination of democratic and European values ??with the defense of Germany’s national interests, and those interests included “finding a modus vivendi with Russia so as not to find ourselves in a state of war, but to be able to coexist despite our differences”, and on that he based his policy with the Kremlin.
The former president then added that “this attack on Ukraine finds no justification; it is a brutal disregard of international law, for which there is no excuse.” And she continued: “It is an objective breach of all international legal norms and of everything that allows us in Europe to live together in peace. If we start going back through the centuries and say which territory belongs to whom, then we will only have war, that cannot be!”
The former foreign minister also said that she praises the courage with which the Ukrainians, led by President Volodymyr Zelensky, are fighting to defend their country. Angela Merkel argued that “Ukraine is also a geopolitical hostage of the West. Putin’s hatred, Putin’s enmity, goes against the Western democratic model. I remember very well how I have often talked to people and told them: ‘You know he wants to destroy Europe, he wants to destroy the European Union because he sees it as a prelude to NATO.”
The 67-year-old former chancellor maintained that she never believed that “Putin would change thanks to commercial relations”, but that, if a political rapprochement was not possible, “it was relevant to at least have commercial relations”, she justified. It was obvious to her that Russia “would always be a neighbor of Europe, which we could not completely ignore”, alluding to the size of the country and its nuclear arsenal.
Former President Merkel supported the management of the crisis by Chancellor Olaf Scholz and assured that she has “full confidence” in the current political leadership of Germany.
