“A common policy toward Russia? You failed to create one? What nonsense is that? In fact, what happened is the result of the very common policy toward Russia that Angela Merkel, Gerhard Schröder, and that whole bunch actually did create. And its effect is war,” said Michał Rachoń on his program on TV Republika, referring to Angela Merkel’s interview. The former German chancellor claimed that Poland and the Baltic states share responsibility for… the outbreak of war in Ukraine.
On February 24, 2022 – almost four years ago – Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Earlier, in 2014, Russia had illegally annexed Crimea and started military operations in Donbas. Over the following years, Western European countries, particularly Germany, continued their economic cooperation with Russia – despite its aggression against Georgia and Ukraine. The symbol of this cooperation was the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, a Russian-German project pushed by former Chancellor Angela Merkel. As a result, the West indirectly financed Putin’s war machine.
Angela Merkel recently gave an interview in which she made scandalous remarks about Poland and the Baltic states, suggesting that we share partial responsibility for Putin’s decision to start the war against Ukraine.
“In June 2021, I sensed that Putin no longer took the Minsk Agreements seriously, so I proposed a new format in which the EU could talk directly with Putin. Some did not support this idea. Those were mainly the Baltic states, but Poland was also against it. In any case, it didn’t happen. Then I left office, and that’s when Putin’s aggression began,” said Merkel.
Rachoń: “What nonsense is that?“
Michał Rachoń – TV Republika’s program director and co-author of the documentary series Reset and the book Zgoda, both dedicated to the topic of the political “reset” in Polish-Russian relations during Donald Tusk’s first government – responded today to Merkel’s “revelations.”
The journalist appeared visibly astonished by what the former German chancellor had said in her interview, so he recalled a few facts that strongly contradict that narrative.
“A common policy toward Russia? You failed to create one? What nonsense is that? In fact, what happened is the result of the common policy toward Russia that Angela Merkel, Gerhard Schröder, and that whole circle actually did create. And its effect is war – a war for which you share responsibility and for which you are now trying to shift the blame onto those who warned from the very beginning. Among them, Poland and the Baltic states. The so-called unified European policy is precisely the policy pursued by Germany. Germany did business with Russia and tried to force other countries to adopt that same approach. Unfortunately, in many cases, they succeeded,” said Michał Rachoń on his program.
He then recalled the events of April 2010 – including the Smolensk tragedy.
“On April 9, 2010, Dmitry Medvedev signed his name on a pipeline that was later laid on the bottom of the Baltic Sea. The years-long process of negotiations, discussions, and construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline began on April 9, 2010. The next day was Smolensk…” noted Rachoń.
He continued: “That pipeline connected Germany with the Russian Federation. Cheap Russian gas was pumped to Germany so that Germany could use those cheap resources to make other European economies (and beyond) dependent on it and to enforce the use of exactly that fuel, the price of which had been negotiated, among others, by Schröder – the former German chancellor who now earns his money working for Vladimir Putin. But that’s only one of the threads.”
Nord Stream turned out to be such a great deal for Germany that once they realized it worked – and at a time when Poles were warning against it – they decided to build another pipeline with Russia. Construction began in 2015, a year after the Russian Federation had already occupied Crimea. At that point, Russia and Vladimir Putin, after the wars in Chechnya and Georgia, had already attacked Ukraine. And what did Germany do? They kept doing business with Russia. “They even said, don’t worry, everything’s fine,” Rachoń said further.
Rachoń pointed out that “at the time all this was happening, Angela Merkel was governing Germany and pursuing her so-called ‘unified European policy’ toward that same Vladimir Putin she met at NATO summits. When talk arose about there being no place in NATO for Georgia or Ukraine, Putin told Merkel that if the West didn’t back off and withdraw its forces from Central Europe, he would wage wars. Everyone pretended nothing was happening. Gas kept flowing one way – from Russia to Germany. From Berlin to Moscow, billions of euros were flowing in the other direction…”