Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has attempted to push blame onto Poland and the Baltic states for the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine as she attempts to salvage what remains of her political legacy and promote her book.
During a promotional tour in Hungary to push her 2024 memoirs, Merkel spoke with the Partizan media outlet , offering an alternative historical perspective on the invasion of Ukraine.
In comments reported by the German daily Bild, the former chancellor reiterated her assertion that the 2015 Minsk Agreement, which she helped negotiate to halt fighting in the Donbas region of Ukraine, had “brought about calm” and provided Kyiv with the time to “gather strength” to combat Russia on a firmer footing.
However, Merkel claimed that in 2021, she had recognised that the agreement was “no longer being taken seriously by Putin” and therefore pushed for a new framework for the European Union to negotiate for peace directly.
She singled out Poland and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as having been “against it”, claiming that they were concerned that the EU would not “have a common policy toward Russia” in such negotiations.
“In any case, it didn’t come to fruition. Then I left office, and then Putin’s aggression began,” Merkel said.
Bild noted that the former chancellor’s argument that the Minsk agreements were successful ignored the fact that there was consistent fighting between Russia and Ukraine in the years following the deal and that Putin’s forces had killed or wounded over 5,000 Ukrainian soldiers between 2015 and 2021.
Merkel’s apparent attempt to cast blame on Poland and the Baltics also seemingly serves to overshadow her own role in preventing the 2022 invasion.
Indeed, even senior German government figures, such as former Justice Minister Marco Buschmann, have pointed to the decision by Merkel to continue with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in the wake of Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea as having emboldened Moscow.
“Knowing what we do today, the decision to pursue Nord Stream 2 following the annexation of Crimea in 2014 was Germany’s contribution to the outbreak of the war in Ukraine,” Buschmann said in 2022 following the invasion.
Merkel’s policy of pursuing inefficient green energy domestically while supplementing shortfalls with Russian gas and oil was a frequent point of criticism by U.S. President Donald Trump, who warned in 2018 that Nord Stream 2 would leave Germany “captive” to Vladimir Putin.
However, Trump’s warnings were ignored by Berlin, with German diplomats openly laughing at Trump’s warnings when he raised the issue at the United Nations.
The hubris of the Merkel government on Russian energy was laid bare after a German intelligence report produced in the lead-up to the invasion was later leaked to the press, revealing that her government had determined that granting the certification for Nord Stream 2 would “not jeopardise the security of gas supply in Germany and the European Union.”
This proved to be disastrously wrong, with Russian supplies of pipeline gas and oil being cut off just months later as Moscow retaliated against the EU sanctions levied in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
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