Vladimir Putin is up to his old tricks and the world is playing along
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Let no-one say that Angela Merkel isn’t onto Vladimir Putin’s dirty tricks and cynicism. As a former East German, the chancellor speaks Russian just as the Russian president, a former KGB offer stationed in Dresden, is fluent in German. They’ve known each other for decades. She still vividly recalls his attempt during a visit in 2007 to intimidate her, a known cynophobe, by letting his black Labrador Koni sniff her.
So, as the worldly-wise leader of a country that’s often naively Russophile, Merkel’s done her best over the years to call Putin out. When he seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and then instigated the fighting in its eastern Donbas region, she took the West’s lead in condemning the breach and containing the crisis.
When Russia kept feeding the West, including Germany, disinformation and fake news, she let him know that she didn’t like it, but kept up the dialogue. After a Russian cyber-attack on the Bundestag and her own e-mail account, Merkel called such methods “outrageous”. And after a gangland-style execution last summer of a Chechen who had fought against Russian forces — in a Berlin park in broad daylight — Merkel demanded Russian answers but received none.
And then, this month, came the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, the most prominent figure in Russia’s remaining opposition movement. Merkel’s reaction has been stronger than that of any other Western leader. She’s had Navalny airlifted out of Russia and brought to a clinic in Berlin, where she’s put guards around his bed.
But now, with Navalny still in a coma, all sides are reverting to the usual script. The doctors in Berlin have confirmed that they found a cholinesterase inhibitor in Navalny — though there’s no proof, of course, that Putin had anything to do with getting this nerve agent into his body. Merkel and her foreign minister, Heiko Maas, immediately and “urgently” demanded that Russia investigate this poisoning “in a completely transparent way”.
On cue, a Kremlin spokesperson feigned astonishment that “our German colleagues are in such a hurry in using the word poisoning”. The speaker of the lower house of Russia’s parliament suggested the whole episode may be just another “provocation by Germany and other members of the EU aimed at creating more allegations against our country”. And everything goes on as usual.
In these recurring charades between the West and Russia, and in particular between Merkel and Putin, ...
So, as the worldly-wise leader of a country that’s often naively Russophile, Merkel’s done her best over the years to call Putin out. When he seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and then instigated the fighting in its eastern Donbas region, she took the West’s lead in condemning the breach and containing the crisis.
When Russia kept feeding the West, including Germany, disinformation and fake news, she let him know that she didn’t like it, but kept up the dialogue. After a Russian cyber-attack on the Bundestag and her own e-mail account, Merkel called such methods “outrageous”. And after a gangland-style execution last summer of a Chechen who had fought against Russian forces — in a Berlin park in broad daylight — Merkel demanded Russian answers but received none.
And then, this month, came the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, the most prominent figure in Russia’s remaining opposition movement. Merkel’s reaction has been stronger than that of any other Western leader. She’s had Navalny airlifted out of Russia and brought to a clinic in Berlin, where she’s put guards around his bed.
But now, with Navalny still in a coma, all sides are reverting to the usual script. The doctors in Berlin have confirmed that they found a cholinesterase inhibitor in Navalny — though there’s no proof, of course, that Putin had anything to do with getting this nerve agent into his body. Merkel and her foreign minister, Heiko Maas, immediately and “urgently” demanded that Russia investigate this poisoning “in a completely transparent way”.
On cue, a Kremlin spokesperson feigned astonishment that “our German colleagues are in such a hurry in using the word poisoning”. The speaker of the lower house of Russia’s parliament suggested the whole episode may be just another “provocation by Germany and other members of the EU aimed at creating more allegations against our country”. And everything goes on as usual.
In these recurring charades between the West and Russia, and in particular between Merkel and Putin, ...
