The German chancellor deeply distrusts her Russian counterpart | Europe
Sixteen years later, each country’s expectation of the other has failed to materialise. Germany had imagined a more liberal Russia; Russia had hoped that Germany would help convince Europe to treat Russia as an equal, and to create a free-trade zone from Lisbon to Vladivostok. On August 20th Mrs Merkel will travel to Moscow during the last weeks of her chancellorship to say goodbye to a leader whom she has come to distrust deeply.
The debacle in Afghanistan will be high on their list, as well as the nearly finished gas pipeline, which America’s Congress fiercely opposes. Now known as Nord Stream 2, it has become a stain on Mrs Merkel’s legacy. The chancellor is normally adept at balancing competing interests, but she utterly underestimated how much the pipeline, which she supported mainly to appease the business lobby and her Social Democratic coalition partners, would upset America and Ukraine.
Pundits differ on whether the turning-point in German-Russian relations was Mr Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin-directed hacking of the Bundestag’s computer systems in 2015 or the killing in 2019 of a Chechen dissident in a Berlin park. Yet all agree that the poisoning last year of Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s leading opponent, was the last straw.
According to Andrey Kortunov, the head of the Russian International Affairs Council, a foreign-affairs think-tank in Moscow, the Russian government has no desire to increase tensions with Germany. It expects continuity with Mrs Merkel’s policies if Armin Laschet, her party’s candidate, becomes the next chancellor. If, however, the next chancellor is the Greens’ Annalena Baerbock, who opposes Nord Stream 2, Germany looks likely to get tougher with Russia.
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