Angela Merkel Says She Lost Influence Over Putin as a Lame Duck Leader – Angela Merkel insisted that her position as a lame duck in her final months in office rendered it nearly impossible for her to influence Vladimir Putin’s behavior. The former German chancellor appeared both defensive and quietly defiant regarding her inability to alter the February invasion of Ukraine by the Russian president.
Merkel stated in an interview with the German news magazine Spiegel that she was acutely aware of her limited negotiating power with Putin due to the fact that she would not run for a fifth term. “I no longer had the power to push my ideas through because everyone knew ‘she’ll be gone by autumn’,” she said, describing how she had tried to establish a round of European talks after a meeting in the summer of 2021 between the US president, Joe Biden, and Putin.
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“Had I been standing again in the September I’d have kept drilling down, but at my final meeting in Moscow with Putin and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, the feeling was clear: from a political power point of view, you’re finished. For Putin it is only power that counts.” In her interviews with Alexander Osang, which took place over a period of a year and in various locations, Merkel insisted that her stance on the Minsk agreement – which brought a ceasefire after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula – had been right.
Key points of the Minsk peace talks, including disarmament and international oversight, were never implemented. Merkel stated that despite this, the agreement gave Kiev time to better arm itself against the Russian military. According to Osang, she repeatedly implied that she felt misunderstood about what she had attempted to accomplish as German leader, facing as she does a barrage of accusations over some of her decisions, such as her decision to block Ukraine’s admission to NATO in Bucharest in 2008, which was viewed by many as having harmed the country’s ability to defend itself.
Her refusal to acknowledge her mistakes in allowing Germany to become increasingly reliant on Russian gas supplies is an additional major criticism. Merkel also appeared to be making a loose comparison between her behavior and that of Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister associated with the flawed policy of appeasement towards Adolf Hitler by allowing him to expand Nazi Germany’s territory in the 1930s.
Merkel was intrigued to see Chamberlain portrayed in a more positive light in the Netflix drama Munich – the Edge of War, based on the novel by Robert Harris, in which Jeremy Irons portrays him – “not as a fearful stirrup-holder for Hitler but as a strategist who used his country to create a buffer so that it could better prepare for German attack.” Merkel added it was unfair to suggest she had not paid Ukraine enough attention in 2013 and 2014.
“People write about 2013 and 2014 as if the Minsk agreement had been my sole concern, and they ask, ‘How could you have taken your eye off Ukraine?’ But this is too simple. We had elections in Germany, there was always something going on with Greece at the time, and I broke my pelvic bone,” she said, referring to an injury incurred while on a cross-country skiing holiday in 2014.
Among the anecdotes she relays in a wide-ranging interview in which she is reflective and sometimes gloomy about her time in office, are encounters with the Queen – though Merkel said she was never able to establish what the British monarch thought about Brexit – and a G7 meeting with Boris Johnson, who she said had been attempting to undermine the Northern Ireland protocol.
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She stated that among the activities she had time for since leaving her position were watching The Crown and Babylon Berlin. She had also watched the Queen’s funeral on television and taken an interest in many of the guests she recognized, including Tony Blair, whom Osang claims she referred to as a “great political talent who had lost his reputation” over the Iraq war.
She mentions reading Schiller, Shakespeare, and Sebastian Haffner’s biography of Winston Churchill, and says she is currently reading Churchill’s massive war diaries with her longtime office manager, Beate Baumann. She and Baumann are also reportedly writing a book about her tenure as chancellor for which they have received a substantial advance. She stated that one of her first out-of-post vacations had been a tour of Tuscany with an art historian friend last spring.