I wasn’t naive when dealing with Russia, insists Merkel

ANGELA Merkel came under fire last night after insisting she had nothing to apologise for over Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

The German former chancellor has been accused of being soft on Moscow – emboldening it to invade its neighbour.

In her first interview since quitting last year, Mrs Merkel said she was not naive in her dealings with Vladimir Putin, who she frequently met during her 16 years in charge.

She claimed to have averted almost certain conflict by blocking Ukraine’s 2008 bid to join Nato, which would have been a ‘declaration of war’ for Putin.

Mrs Merkel said she had ‘at no time given in to illusions’ that her approach, which earned her the nickname of the Putin Whisperer, would change the Kremlin’s behaviour. She said she repeatedly warned allies that the Russian president wanted ‘to destroy the EU because he sees it as a precursor to Nato’.

But Ukraine last night criticised Mrs Merkel for deepening Europe’s reliance on Russian energy, most notably with Berlin’s need for Moscow’s gas.

Presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said: ‘If Chancellor Merkel always knew that Russia was planning a war and Putin’s goal is to destroy the EU, then why would Germany build the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline?’

He accused Mrs Merkel of having ‘shoved’ Europe toward increased dependency on Russian energy.

Nord Stream 2 had been set to double Russian gas deliveries to Germany. It was shelved by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in late February over Russia’s aggression, and Berlin is now joining its EU partners in a race to wean the West off Russian oil, gas and coal.

Mrs Merkel made the controversial comments in her first major interview since stepping down in December.

‘I tried to work toward calamity being averted, and diplomacy was not wrong if it doesn’t succeed,’ she said in an on-stage interview televised live from a Berlin theatre.

‘I don’t see that I should say now that it was wrong, and so I won’t apologise. It is a matter of great sorrow that it didn’t succeed, but I don’t blame myself now for trying.’

Mrs Merkel, who championed a commerce-driven, pragmatic approach toward Moscow that left Germany heavily reliant on Russian energy imports, said the invasion of Ukraine had marked a turning point. There is ‘no justification whatsoever’ for the ‘brutal’ and illegal war of aggression, she said, adding that Putin had made ‘a big mistake’.

She batted away criticism that it had been a mistake to block Ukraine from joining the Nato military alliance in 2008, however.

Nato pledged then that Ukraine and Georgia would one day become members. But French and German concern over Russia’s reactions dashed their hopes of being granted a ‘membership action plan’ that would bring them into the alliance within five to ten years.

Mrs Merkel said Ukraine was not ready at the time and she wanted to avoid ‘further escalation’ with Putin, who was seething about the alliance’s perceived expansion eastwards.

‘I was very sure that Putin would not just let [Ukraine’s Nato membership] happen. That would have been … a declaration of war for him,’ she said, adding that Ukraine at the time was not ‘the one we know today’. Describing its former status as a corrupt country dominated by oligarchs, she said: ‘It wasn’t an internally democratically stable country.’

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, whose country remains outside Nato despite extensive Western defence aid since the invasion, has described Germany’s decision in 2008 as a ‘miscalculation’. Finland and Sweden have both applied to join the alliance following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

‘Dominated by oligarchs’