Former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel, in her memoir of the years of her administration, referred to the process of Ukraine’s accession to NATO and the characters of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. The German newspaper Die Zeit published excerpts from the memoir, which will be published on November 26.
According to Merkel, it was naïve to assume that Putin would accept the new arrangement of things and do nothing with Ukraine’s accession to NATO.
“A man who was always on the alert so as not to be taken by surprise was always ready to attack, including showing who was the boss here with the help of a dog or making others wait for him. All this could be considered childish, and one could disagree or shake one’s head. But Russia would not disappear from the world map because of that,” Merkel wrote.
By the episode with the dog, Merkel was referring to her meeting with Putin in Sochi in 2007, when the Russian president, knowing his guest was afraid of dogs, called him into the negotiation room.
“He was not interested in building democratic structures or in the prosperity of a well-functioning economy in his country or elsewhere,” the former chancellor believes.
“Rather, he wanted to confront the fact that the United States emerged victorious from the Cold War.” “He wanted Russia to remain an irreplaceable pole in the multipolar world after the end of the Cold War. He primarily relied on his experience working in the special services to achieve that goal,” concluded the former chancellor.
