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Angela Merkel has defended her refusal to give Ukraine a path to NATO membership in 2008, saying it would have been “playing with fire” to ignore Russia’s opposition to Kiev joining the military alliance.
It is in the argument. Independence: Memoirs 1954-2021The four-time German chancellor’s much-anticipated memoirs, excerpts of which were published in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit on Wednesday.
Merkel has faced intense criticism over her foreign policy in the years leading up to the war since Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with some of her critics accusing her of aligning with Russian President Vladimir Putin. was
Immediately after the attack, Merkel defended her insistence on keeping lines of communication open with Putin, saying that Russia is the world’s second-largest nuclear power and “I can’t pretend it doesn’t exist.” .
But weeks after the war, after atrocities by Russian troops in Bucha near Kiev, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky invited Merkel and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy to visit the town to “mark the 14 years that Russia has been given.” The effects of “privileges” can be seen. .
Much of the criticism of Merkel has focused on the position she took at the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008, where she and Sarkozy resisted attempts to present a concrete timetable to Ukraine and Georgia, which known as “Membership Action Plan” (MAP). will lead to accession.
Merkel said granting MAP status to the two former Soviet republics would have been a promise of NATO membership that could hardly be reversed.
In the book, she says her main reason for blocking Ukraine’s membership was that Russia’s Black Sea fleet was still stationed in Crimea, a peninsula controlled by Kiev until annexed by Moscow in 2014. before
“It was unprecedented for a NATO candidate to be so entrenched in the Russian military structure,” she writes. “Furthermore, only a minority of the Ukrainian population at the time supported NATO membership: the country was deeply divided.”
In the case of Georgia, its memorandum cited “unresolved territorial disputes in the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia” as “reason enough” to reject the country’s membership bid.
Merkel says it would be “playing with fire” to discuss MAP status for Ukraine and Georgia without analyzing the situation from the perspective of Putin, who has made it clear he wants to restore Russia’s great power status. are
He thinks that by keeping Ukraine and Georgia on track to join NATO, “they would have been protected from Putin’s aggression and that status would have acted as a deterrent, or that Putin would have taken those developments for granted”.
“The assumption that Putin will simply twiddle his thumbs in the period between the MAP decision and the acquisition of Ukraine and Georgia is counterintuitive. [Nato] Membership struck me as wishful thinking,” she adds.
The Bucharest summit ended with a compromise. Ukraine and Georgia were not granted MAP status but the alliance agreed that “these countries will become members of NATO”.
Merkel says she is glad the alliance was not split during the Iraq war. . . There was no choice but to compromise, even if that compromise, like any other, came at a price.”
For Georgia and Ukraine, the denial of MAP status “shattered their hopes”, while for Putin, she writes that NATO had made a general commitment to these countries, they still ” “Declaration of War”.
