Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier believes that a return to normal relations with Russia is impossible as long as President Vladimir Putin is in power there. “There will be no return to normality under Putin”, explains Steinmeier in the ZDF “Morgenmagazin”. At the moment he cannot say whether Russia has a future in Europe.
In the TV interview, Steinmeier repeats his own mistakes in Russia policy. “The really sad thing is that we failed on many counts,” said the President. This relates to efforts to integrate Russia into a European security architecture and to support it on the way to democratic conditions. Putin have become one “bunkered warmonger” developed. “It was a misjudgment that we – and I too – thought that even a Putin of 2021 would not ultimately accept the country’s total political, economic and moral ruin for his imperial madness.”
Steinmeier admits that his efforts in his previous post as Federal Foreign Minister to establish a peaceful relationship with Russia failed. “We have not managed to stop the development that has now occurred and which has now erupted in this war,” says the Federal President. “We should have taken the warnings from our Eastern European partners more seriously.” In particular, Germany’s adherence to the German-Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline project was a mistake“because it cost us a lot of credibility with our European partners”.
Source: Stern
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