Lavrov exploits Merkel interview and claims: "The West has declared war on us"
Created: 12/29/2022, 4:16 p.m
By: Florian Naumann
Ice age in Sochi: Angela Merkel 2017 in an uninvited round with Vladimir Putin (centre) and Sergey Lavrov (right).
© Alexei Nikolsky
Angela Merkel is now speaking quite openly about the history of the Ukraine war.
Sergey Lavrov now wants to use this as evidence for a "declaration of war".
Moscow/Munich – A several-week-old interview by former Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) is still preoccupying the Kremlin.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov now used the statements on Russian state television as evidence for a much-cited thesis of his government: the West had "declared war" on Russia a long time ago.
Merkel interview to serve as ammunition for Russia: "The collective West is at war with us"
On December 7, Merkel said in Die
Zeit
that the Minsk agreement had above all given Ukraine a grace period before a Russian attack.
"It was clear to all of us that the conflict was frozen, that the problem had not been solved, but that was exactly what gave Ukraine valuable time." In 2014, Russia could have overrun the country, she judged.
After Christmas, Merkel renewed this thesis in an interview with the Italian newspaper
Corriere della Sera
.
According to the Tass state agency on the Rossiya-1 TV channel, Lavrov has now come to a far-reaching conclusion.
"The collective West, led by a nuclear power - the United States - is at war with us," he said.
This was explained "quite a long time ago".
"Nobody wanted to implement the Minsk agreement, it seems, and Mrs. Merkel has now confirmed it again."
Putin himself made a similar statement in December: He had always assumed that the German government "means it honestly with us".
How exactly Lavrov derives a literal “declaration of war” on Russia from the allegedly knowingly unimplemented agreement on a region of Ukraine is not clear from the report.
But Putin's top diplomat also renewed Russian theories and allegations in the same breath: he claimed that there had been a coup d'etat in Ukraine "orchestrated by the USA" and "supported by the European Union" - apparently with a view to the Maidan protests in the year 2014
Russia points to Merkel interview: Years of dispute over the Minsk agreement
Merkel had already described the situation surrounding the work with the Minsk Agreement differently in November.
The Russian attack on Ukraine did not come as a surprise to her, Merkel told
Der Spiegel
at the time .
"The Minsk agreement was hollowed out." In the summer of 2021, together with French President Emmanuel Macron, she wanted to create "an independent European discussion format" with Vladimir Putin.
"But I no longer had the strength to assert myself, because everyone knew: It will be gone in the fall." For Putin, "only power counts," explained Merkel.
The Minsk peace plan was negotiated after the first fighting in eastern Ukraine in 2015.
It provided for far-reaching obligations for the conflicting parties in eastern Ukraine, which is under Russian influence, such as a ceasefire, a security zone and the withdrawal of all heavy weapons.
But most of them were never implemented.
Minsk accords: Russia and Ukraine blame each other
Russia and Ukraine blamed each other for this - although Russia officially did not see itself as a party to the conflict in the fighting between pro-Russian separatists and the central government in Kyiv.
Among other things, Kyiv accused Moscow of giving weapons across the border to the separatists.
The Kremlin complained about the lack of a Ukrainian constitutional reform, including a special status for the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in Ukraine.
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It doesn't seem unlikely that calculation was involved on both sides.
According to Merkel, the West was playing for time in order to make a Russian annexation, which violates international law, more difficult.
"The document adopted in Minsk will allow Russia to hold Kyiv responsible for the failure of the agreement in the not unlikely event," said political scientist Wojciech Konończuk from 2015
Center for Eastern European Studies in Warsaw in an article for the Federal Agency for Civic Education.
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