“We failed.” The President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, evoked in these words the policy pursued vis-à-vis Russia, when he was still Angela Merkel’s Foreign Minister. In particular, he assured that Germany’s cooperation on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, linking Europe to Russia, was “unquestionably a mistake”. “We clung to ties that Russia no longer believed in, and that our partners had warned us against,” he summed up, even as the former German chancellor defended her balance sheet on the same day and said “taking responsibility for decisions”.
One apologizes, the other assumes. For the German magazine Focus, that says a lot about the respective situations of these two leading political figures. “If they both showed understanding towards Russia [par le passé]a difference of