Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine that Putin did not take into account the opinions of the Chancellor who was relinquishing power just a year ago.
20:34•Updated 20:37
Former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel says he had no influence on the Russian president to Vladimir Putin at the end of his term of office, which ended last December.
Merkel defended her Russian policy as German of Der Spiegel magazine (you switch to another service) in an interview that has been quoted by Reuters, among others, broadcasting company BBC (you switch to another service) and news site Politico (you are moving to another service).
Merkel said she clearly sensed during her last visit to Moscow in August 2021 that Putin was no longer paying attention to the chancellor, who was known to leave her post after the fall elections.
– The mood was very clear: in terms of power politics, I was past. For Putin, only power matters, Merkel said in an interview with Der Spiegel.
The Russian Foreign Minister was also present at the meeting Sergei Lavrovwhen earlier Merkel had talked with Putin privately.
According to Merkel, he tried together with the French president Emmanuel Macron with organizes discussions with Putin in the summer of 2021, but without success.
Merkel has been criticized since the start of the war for the fact that under her leadership Germany increased its dependence on Russian energy and did not oppose Russia’s military actions in Ukraine strongly enough.
Among other things, a party member and former chairman of the German Bundestag Wolfgang Schäuble recently demanded that Merkel admit her mistake.
Merkel said in an interview that she tried the then US president Barack Obama’s with to do everything possible to prevent Russia from advancing in Ukraine after the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Merkel also defended the Minsk agreement signed in 2015 to calm the war in eastern Ukraine, which she was negotiating. According to him, the agreement gave Ukraine time to prepare for a Russian attack.
By 2021, however, according to Merkel, the agreement had lost its meaning and the Russian attack therefore did not come as a surprise to her.
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Correspondent’s analysis: Merkel went public to defend her Russia policy – and revealed a few things about Putin in the process