A Few Sanctions and That Was It: Merkel’s Legacy on Russia Casts a Shadow over Her Party
Shortly after the Maidan uprising, Putin seized Crimea and provided financial and military support to separatists in Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk regions. He wasn’t prepared to accept a westernization of Ukraine and it may also have been clear to him that he could get away with it. Merkel called him and told him that the annexation of Crimea was “unacceptable” and a “violation of international law.” She imposed a few sanctions, and that was it.
During negotiations in Minsk in early 2015, Merkel and then-French President François Hollande reached a formal cease-fire agreement in eastern Europe, but is was never actually adhered to. In a poll, half of the Germans surveyed said they were in favor of accepting the annexation of Crimea.
Merkel later justified Germany’s acceptance of the blatant injustice done in Crimea and eastern Ukraine with the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The Americans didn’t intervene then either, she said, adding that she doesn’t hold it against them. Sometimes, according to her logic, you have to accept present injustices in the hopes of a better future.
Putin Constantly Tested Merkel
In Germany, too, Putin’s Russia tested the chancellor’s tolerance for suffering. In 2015, Russian hackers conducted a cyberattack on the computers of Germany’s federal parliament, the Bundestag, and even managed to access a computer in Merkel’s parliamentary office. Several years later under questioning in the Bundestag, Merkel provided a bit of insight into her state of mind. “If I may be quite honest: It pains me,” because “I strive every day for a better relationship with Russia.”
But Putin wasn’t particularly interested, as the “Lisa case” would demonstrate. In 2016, a girl of German-Russian descent briefly disappeared in Berlin. When the 13-year-old resurfaced, she claimed to have been kidnapped and raped by men with “Mediterranean” appearances.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov jumped into the debate, speaking of “our girl” and accused the German government of “an attempt to whitewash reality with political correctness for domestic political reasons” to avoid discrediting its refugee policies. Germany at the time had just absorbed hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the war in Syria. It later turned out that Lisa had actually just been staying at a friend’s place.
In 2019, a Russian intelligence agency had an alleged opponent of the regime assassinated in Berlin’s Tiergarten park. Putin, it seemed, had lost any respect he may have had for Germany.
Merkel once said of their encounters with each other: “He tests you all day long. If you don’t stand up to it, you just get smaller and smaller.” Never one to shy away from humiliating people, Putin once allowed his dog sniff Merkel during a meeting in Sochi even though, as Merkel later said, he “knew very well that I was not eager to greet his dog.”
When the secret service seriously injured Alexei Navalny in a poison attack in 2020, Merkel had the regime opponent flown to Berlin so that doctors could treat him here. “The crime against Alexei Navalny is a crime against the basic values and fundamental rights we stand for,” she said at the time.
In light of her experiences with Putin, it must have been perfectly clear to the chancellor that this man couldn’t be trusted with anything. That she didn’t stand up to him more strongly in political-military terms is perhaps still understandable. What remains incomprehensible, though, is why Merkel did nothing to reduce Germany’s dependence on energy imports from Russia.
The Nord Stream 2 pipeline that her predecessor Gerhard Schröder initiated after leaving office, comes ashore near Greifswald, a college town that is part of Merkel’s former constituency. She once described the endeavor as a “devil’s project,” and yet she did nothing to stop its construction. When it came to economic issues, Merkel’s paramount concern was always German prosperity. Most in her party were only too happy to go along.
The CDU and SPD Agreed on Energy Policy
When it comes to energy policy, the Christian Democrats didn’t differ significantly from the SPD in their approach to Russia. They believed that Russia would supply oil, natural gas and coal even in the worst political crisis – as was always the case during the Cold War, as they pointed out.
Moreover, the conservatives pursued liberal economic ideas in their energy policies and felt the gas market should be largely left to the energy companies, without government influence. A dangerous dependency developed as a result. With the completion of Nord Stream 1, Russian natural gas imports to Germany reached a share of around 40 percent, supplied exclusively by the Russian state-owned company Gazprom.