When I heard about the scandal which erupted after Angela Merkel’s interview in Hungary last week, I remembered a pleasant summer scene of 17 years ago. A magnificent view over Berlin from the panoramic window of the official apartment of the Bundeskanzler. Table laid. My dinner host is none other than Angela Merkel.
She wanted to talk – or rather hear – about Russia, where Dmitry Medvedev had just been “elected” to warm the chair for Vladimir Putin for the next four years. Our party was small, all of us invited on condition that we won’t spill the beans after the conversation.
What impressed me then were two things: The chancellor’s excellent understanding of how Putin’s Russia “works”, and her marked unwillingness to react to any criticism of the Russian regime. Merkel’s questions were sharp and to the point, driving the conversation and covering a lot of ground. She had a firm understanding of Russian power dynamics, economics and many domestic issues. But every time one of the guests mentioned something about election manipulation or the Kremlin’s nearly manic obsession with preventing Russia’s neighbours from joining NATO, the chancellor would freeze or respond with something anodyne bordering on dismissive.
Soon after Russia invaded Georgia – and got away with creating two puppet states on Georgian soil. This happened after Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy blocked Ukraine’s and Georgia’s path to NATO membership at the alliance’s Bucharest summit in March. Remembering the conversation in Berlin I came to the conclusion that the chancellor had taken the decision to pursue a policy of de facto appeasing the Putin regime, consciously and in the long-term.
Unlike her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, whom the Kremlin easily won over with flattery and a sinecure in the Nord Stream project, Merkel hardly got any personal material benefit from this policy. The former chancellor believed, and still believes, that she acted in the interests of Germany and the whole of Europe.
Her calculation was simple: Russia may not become – and most likely will not become – a real democracy. But massive revenues from oil and gas will create dependence on all things European so significant that the Kremlin will inevitably choose “peace and stability”. And if this required tacitly accepting Moscow’s political dominance in the so-called “post-Soviet space”, then this was an acceptable price.
Merkel’s interview in Hungary attracted attention and opprobrium for allegedly blaming Poland and the Baltic States for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Let us be charitable to the ex-chancellor and presume that she was clarifying the chronology: She wanted to invite Putin to the European Council in summer 2021, the Poles and the Balts objected, and the meeting did not happen. “Then I left office”, Merkel explained. And then Putin invaded Ukraine.
The real scandal of the interview is the former chancellor’s unshakeable belief that she could have persuaded Putin not to invade. Moreover, she still insists her policy towards Moscow was right, even after the annexation of Crimea. She even makes a clumsy excuse for Putin: COVID made him so isolated it was difficult to communicate. But other top politicians had the same problem and somehow managed to maintain contact with reality.
Merkel also refuses to acknowledge her grave error in blocking Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO membership, although it is now crystal clear that this fatal decision left both countries at Russia’s mercy.
Despite her formidable intellect and understanding of Russia’s political dynamics and elites, Merkel failed to grasp something very fundamental. That Putin’s Russia is essentially a weak state ruled by a secret policeman with a conspiratorial mind and delusions of grandeur. Bismarckian realpolitik is designed for rational politicians who are not in constant fear of losing power – on Putin it is ineffectual.
And Ukraine is now paying the price of Merkel’s delusions. It is a pity she is too weak to admit it.
Konstantin Eggert is a Russian-born journalist with DW, Germany’s international broadcaster. He is based in Vilnius and was previously editor-in-chief of the BBC Russian Service Moscow bureau.