https://www.zeit.de/2022/51/angela-merkel-russland-fluechtlingskrise-bundeskanzler

Machine Translated by Google

Angela Merkel

"Did you think I'd come with a ponytail?"

Angela Merkel about her new phase of life, possible Mistakes in their Russia policy, their role in the refugee crisis and the question of whether German chancellors are being treated ungraciously

Interview: Tina Hildebrandt and Giovanni di Lorenzo

December 7, 2022

Merkel: ... But crises are also the norm in human life, and we only had a few years that were special.

ZEIT: Do you ask yourself whether the years of relative calm were also years of

omissions and whether you were not only a crisis manager, but also partly the cause of crises?

Merkel: I wouldn't be a political person if I didn't deal with it. Let's take climate protection, in which Germany has done a great deal in international comparison. With regard to the topic itself, however, I concede: Measured by what the IPCC's International Climate Report says today, not enough has happened. Or let's look at my policy towards Russia and Ukraine. I come to the conclusion that I made the decisions I made back then in a way that I can understand today. It was an attempt to prevent just such a war. The fact that this was not successful does not mean that the attempts were wrong.

ZEIT: But you can still find plausible how you acted in earlier circumstances and still consider it wrong today in view of the results.

See the German text of this section below {

Merkel: But that presupposes also saying what exactly the alternatives were at the time. I thought the initiation of NATO accession for Ukraine and Georgia discussed in 2008 to be wrong. The countries neither had the necessary prerequisites for this, nor had the consequences of such a decision been fully considered, both with regard to Russia's actions against Georgia and Ukraine and to NATO and its rules of assistance. And the 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time.

She also used this time to get stronger, as you can see today. The Ukraine of 2014/15 is not the Ukraine of today. As you saw in the battle for Debaltseve (railway town in Donbass, Donetsk Oblast, ed.) in early 2015, Putin could easily have overrun them at the time. And I very much doubt that the NATO countries could have done as much then as they do now to help Ukraine.

ZEIT: In your first public appearance after the end of your chancellorship, you said that you had already recognized in 2007 how Putin thinks about Europe and that the only language he understands is toughness. If that realization was there so early, why do you have one pursued an energy policy that has made us so dependent on Russia?

Merkel: It was clear to all of us that the conflict was frozen, that the problem had not been solved, but that gave Ukraine valuable time.* Of course, one can now ask the question: in such a situation, why is it still necessary to build Nord Stream 2 approved?

} See the German text of this section below

ZEIT: Yes, why? Especially since there was already very strong criticism of the construction of the pipeline at that time, for example from Poland and the USA.

Merkel: Yes, one could come to different opinions. What was it about? On the one hand, Ukraine attached great importance to remaining a transit country for Russian gas. She wanted to channel gas through her territory and not through the Baltic Sea. Today it is sometimes acted as if every Russian gas molecule was from the devil.

It wasn't like that, the gas was contested. On the other hand, it was not the case that the federal government had applied for the approval of Nord Stream 2, the companies did that. Ultimately, for the federal government and for me, it was a matter of deciding whether we would make a new law as a political act to expressly refuse approval of Nord Stream 2.

ZEIT: What prevented you from doing that?

Merkel: On the one hand, such a refusal in combination with the Minsk Agreement would, in my view, have dangerously worsened the climate with Russia. On the other hand, the energy policy dependency arose because there was less gas from the Netherlands and Great Britain and limited production volumes in Norway.

ZEIT: And there was the phase-out of nuclear energy. Also initiated by you.

Merkel: Right, and the cross-party decision to produce less gas in Germany as well. You should have decided to buy more expensive LNG from Qatar or Saudi Arabia, the USA only became available as an export nation later. That would have made our competitiveness significantly worse. Today, under the pressure of war, this is what I support, but at the time it would have been a much more massive political decision.

ZEIT: Should you have made this decision anyway?

Merkel: No, especially since there would have been no acceptance at all. If you ask me for self-criticism, I'll give you another Example.

ZEIT: The whole world is waiting for a word of self-criticism!

Merkel: That may be the case, but the attitude of the critics does not correspond to my opinion on many points. To simply bow to it just because it's expected, I think would be cheap. I had so many thoughts back then! It would be downright a sign of inadequacy if, just to have some peace and without really thinking like that, I simply said: Oh, right, now I realize it too, that was wrong. But I'll tell you one point that bothers me. It has to do with the fact that the Cold War never really ended because Russia was basically not at peace. When Putin invaded Crimea in 2014, he was expelled from the G8. NATO has also stationed troops in the Baltic States to show that we, as NATO, are ready to defend. In addition, we in the Alliance have decided to spend two percent of each country's gross domestic product on defense. The CDU and CSU were the only ones who still had that in their government program. But we too should have reacted more quickly to Russia's aggressiveness. Germany has not reached the two percent target despite the increase. And I didn't give a passionate speech about it every day either.

ZEIT: Why not? Because you secretly thought you didn't need it?

Merkel: No, but because I acted according to Helmut Kohl's principle: What matters is what comes out at the end. Giving a rousing speech only to end up as a bedside rug wouldn't have helped the budget. But when I look through history for successful recipes, I come to the NATO double-track decision ...

ZEIT: ... Helmut Schmidt ultimately has his say about this decision Lost chancellorship...

Merkel: Right, which only increased my respect for him. What was intelligent about the NATO double-track decision was the dual approach of retrofitting and diplomacy. Translated into the 2 percent target, that means we haven't done enough to deter through increased defense spending.

ZEIT: You have Alexander Osang for a portrait in Spiegel said the sentence: "Tolerating criticism is part of democracy, but at the same time my impression is that an American president is treated with more respect in public than a German chancellor." What exactly did you mean by that?

Merkel: On the one hand, I meant that today political decisions of the past are judged very quickly without recalling the context and critically examining alternatives. That ...

German text

Merkel: Das setzt aber voraus, auch zu sagen, was genau die Alternativen damals waren. Die 2008 diskutierte Einleitung eines Nato- Beitritts der Ukraine und Georgiens hielt ich für falsch. Weder brachten die Länder die nötigen Voraussetzungen dafür mit, noch war zu Ende gedacht, welche Folgen ein solcher Beschluss gehabt hätte, sowohl mit Blick auf Russlands Handeln gegen Georgien und die Ukraine als auch auf die Nato und ihre Beistandsregeln. Und das Minsker Abkommen 2014 war der Versuch, der Ukraine Zeit zu geben.

Anm. d. Red.: Unter dem Minsker Abkommen versteht man eine Reihe von Vereinbarungen für die selbst ernannten Republiken Donezk und Luhansk, die sich unter russischem Einfluss von der Ukraine losgesagt hatten. Ziel war, über einen Waffenstillstand Zeit zu gewinnen, um später zu einem Frieden zwischen Russland und der Ukraine zu kommen.

Sie hat diese Zeit hat auch genutzt, um stärker zu werden, wie man heute sieht. Die Ukraine von 2014/15 ist nicht die Ukraine von heute. Wie man am Kampf um Debalzewe (Eisenbahnerstadt im Donbass, Oblast Donezk, d. Red.) Anfang 2015 gesehen hat, hätte Putin sie damals leicht überrennen können. Und ich bezweifle sehr, dass die Nato-Staaten damals so viel hätten tun können wie heute, um der Ukraine zu helfen.

ZEIT: Beim ersten öffentlichen Auftritt nach dem Ende Ihrer Kanzlerschaft haben Sie erklärt, Sie hätten schon 2007 erkannt, wie Putin über Europa denkt, und dass die einzige Sprache, die er versteht, Härte sei. Wenn diese Erkenntnis so früh da war, warum haben Sie eine Energiepolitik betrieben, die uns von Russland so abhängig gemacht hat?

Merkel: Es war uns allen klar, dass das ein eingefrorener Konflikt war, dass das Problem nicht gelöst war, aber genau das hat der Ukraine wertvolle Zeit gegeben. Natürlich kann man jetzt die Frage stellen: Warum hat man in einer solchen Situation noch dem Bau von Nord Stream 2 zugestimmt?

Source: https://archive.ph/4vZYl

• See German and English pdfs below

* Machine Translated by Google compared to Google Translate