On 7th December, the German newspaper Die Zeit published an interview with Angela Merkel in which she discussed her political legacy, including the Minsk agreements. These were peace deals between Ukraine the Russian-backed separatists brokered by herself and Francois Hollande in 2014/2015.
In the interview, Merkel said something that has attracted widespread attention, prompting responses from several world leaders: “The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time.”
This, along with some of her other comments, has been interpreted as meaning that Merkel never intended to make peace between Ukraine and the Russian-backed separatists; she only wanted to give Ukraine time to build up its armed forces and prepare for a larger conflict.
Referring to Merkel’s comments, Vladimir Putin said, “It was absolutely unexpected for me. It’s disappointing … Trust almost dropped to zero.” This only shows, he went on to say, “that launching the SMO [Special Military Operation] was the right decision”.
Likewise, the Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić said, “Merkel’s statement is something that dramatically changes the state of things … If they could play like that with someone who is much stronger than us, so lie and deceive a country like the Russian Federation … it changes a lot for me.”
However, if you read all of what she said in the interview, it becomes clear that Merkel’s statement has been taken out of context.
Crucially, she begins by saying:
Let’s look at my policy towards Russia and Ukraine. I come to the conclusion that I made the decisions I made back then in a way that I can understand today. It was an attempt to prevent just such a war. The fact that this was not successful does not mean that the attempts were wrong.
Her interviewer responds, “But you can still find plausible how you acted in earlier circumstances and still consider it wrong today in view of the results.”
Merkel then says:
But that presupposes also saying what exactly the alternatives were at the time. I thought the initiation of NATO accession for Ukraine and Georgia discussed in 2008 to be wrong … the consequences of such a decision [had not] been fully considered … And the 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time.
Her interviewer responds, “The aim was to gain time with a ceasefire in order to later come to a peace between Russia and Ukraine.”
Merkel then says:
It also used this time to get stronger, as you can see today. The Ukraine of 2014/15 is not the Ukraine of today. As you saw in the battle for Debaltseve in early 2015, Putin could easily have overrun them at the time. And I very much doubt that the NATO countries could have done as much then as they do now to help Ukraine.
So Merkel begins by stating that her policy towards Russia and Ukraine was an “attempt to prevent … war”. She then mentions that the first Minsk agreement was an “attempt to give Ukraine time,” which her interviewer interprets to mean “time with a ceasefire in order to later come to a peace between Russia and Ukraine”.
Merkel adds that Ukraine “also used this time to get stronger”. The use of “also” suggests she meant that the agreement had two effects: stopping the fighting long enough to broker a lasting peace deal; and allowing Ukraine to get stronger in the interim. She didn’t say it was purely a way of giving Ukraine time to prepare for a larger conflict.
Her comment that Ukraine “used this time to get stronger” could still be seen as gaffe, given how it has been deployed in the media by pro-Russian commentators. Perhaps it would have been prudent of her to refrain from giving them ammunition at such a diplomatically sensitive time.
Indeed, she may have said it for self-serving reasons – to make her own past decisions look more favourable to Ukraine. Recall that Petro Poroshenko, the former Ukrainian President, has repeatedly justified his decision to sign the second Minsk agreement using the same line of argument.
There’s another reason to doubt that Merkel never intended to make peace: if she knew a larger conflict was coming, why did she go ahead with Nord Stream 2? Later in the interview, Merkel states that refusing to proceed with the pipeline in “combination with the Minsk agreement” would have “dangerously worsened the climate with Russia”. This again suggests she believed that peace was possible.
It’s also worth noting that in a November interview with Der Speigel, Merkel said she had “wanted to establish an independent European discussion format with Putin again” in the summer of 2021. Though her efforts went nowhere “because everyone knew [she] would be gone in the fall.”
Whether the Minsk agreements could have prevented war is a matter for debate. But the claim that Merkel only ever saw them as a way of delaying war is not supported by her recent comments.
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550 mile range in my diesel Audi.
5 mins to fill it.
Heater on, fast as a like.
Plants get free CO2 to eat too.
Plus 12 year black kid in the Congo didn’t have to go down a mine to get the stuff that makes the silly EV work
850 on a tankful in my Renault Trafic. Heater or a/c full on
450+ in my little Hyundai i10 .. with heater, lights and radio on. £30 pa road tax; cheap to insure.
EVs are simply not a practical idea for long-distance driving. But perhaps that’s the whole point. They want us either not to travel far, or to use public transport and ditch private vehicles altogether. Remember the old prediction that people will own nothing, and be happy.
And the most galling thing is that all this inconvenience isn’t going to have the slightest beneficial effect on the climate.
Just like the attacks on Farmers harvest (pun intended) very little. This seems to be part of the Agenda 2030 push to Build Back better.
Or ‘Extract Money Faster’
“EVs are simply not a practical idea..”
You could have stopped there. If they were we would have been driving them for decades instead of ICEVs.
And you wouldn’t need to subsidise them with taxpayers cash or use taxpayers money to provide charging points.
Recall of MPs Act 2015:https://notonthebeeb.co.uk/so/c8PDZE4U1?languageTag=en&cid=426765f9-8b6f-43e7-9ca1-b318db924f5c
£1.12 per kWh is a rip off, if you convert the thermal content of petrol at roughly 9 kWh per litre & guesstimate the efficiency of your engine at around 30%. It’s like paying out £3.50 a litre.
Incidentally, at todays prices my petrol car averages about 9p per mille, with most fuel being bought from ASDA – and a lot of the total is longish M road trips.
The whole “Green Energy” thing is a rip-off. Pay more and get less. (If it’s available, that is. And with unreliables such as wind and solar, that’s not guaranteed.)
The huge question is will TPTB allow us to continue to nurse our ICE cars for as long as we can manage? Or will there be a huge bunch of taxes, ULEZ schemes and restrictions on spare parts so as to ‘drive’ us off the road?
If we are allowed to keep them going? I think there will be a big industry in keeping old ICE cars on the road. But if they force the issue and make it EVs or nothing then it is a dismal outlook. I suspect that new technologies will come along for transportation but the current generation of EVs will spell the end of happy family leisure motoring. At best us hoi-polloi may have a cheap low range Chinese EV for local utility travel.
I’m sure the easiest thing for TPTB would be to target fuel supplies. If they can find a way to stop us getting supplies of petrol and diesel, then it’s basically game over for the ICE vehicle.
And there was me thinking the Government are there to facilitate the will of the electorate!
Oh no, it’s there to shape the nation according to its own will. But first it has to hoodwink enough of the electorate into thinking that they both have the same interests.
What a quaint notion!
Let’s face it – if you remove personal transport then the leisure industry is dead. Unemployment, no tax income follows. Think of all the places that are not reachable by public transport. Think of all those who support motor vehicles who will now be unemployed. The hit to the government finances would make Rachel from Account’s imaginary black hole real by many times more.
Mileage with the heating off is not the proper mileage though. It is like saying my plate of steak and chips will fill me up but only if I eat 3 Kitkats first.
The British writer Patrick Hamiltion wrote about the horror of the motorcar. He is almost completely forgotten these days but his novels are well worth reading. Hangover Square, The Slaves of Solitude. He lives on though in one sense and that is through a play he wrote called Gas Light. There was a good Ingrid Bergman film of it. This term has found its way into modern political discourse, gaslighting, although its meaning has been distorted slightly.
One thing I like about the Brits, the common people, is that they never get all enthusiastic about a new technology like the Yanks do. They might adpot it eventually, usually out of laziness and vacantness but there isn’t any expectation that all of this crap could ever make life better. Although I have read horrible stories in educational supplements about how teachers are applauding the fact that every child in their class has an electronic tablet. Basically a zombie machine and you hear that parent give phones to children as young as ten. This is horrific just slightly less horrific than the demoniac smiles of the Yanks selling this crap.
The number of mobile phones per capita far outreached that in the USA in the 1990s.
The cost per unit of electricity obviously varies depending on which type of tariff you’re on but is at least 40p/kwh so charging the author’s Ford at home would work out as about the same cost per mile as his Honda Civic. Therefore it would be impossible to recoup the massive extra cost of the Ford. Proof that EVs are only for the well off.
It would be interesting to compare the cost per mile of an EV versus a petrol or diesel for urban driving and see if the costs work out about the same as motorway driving. Driving at speed means far more air resistance hence higher energy use per mile but urban driving is often stop start. Accelerating uses far more energy than driving at a constant speed and a lot of this energy is lost when braking so driving in traffic may result in roughly the same energy use per mile as motorway driving.
The nail in the coffin is the cost of battery replacement.
It astounds me that anyone chooses to buy an EV – apart from company car drivers who have to get one and gain some tax advantages.
“if you regularly cover high mileage in an EV, you need to travel when everyone else isn’t to avoid queuing at chargers.”
Au contraire, I see all the BEVVERS travelling in groups. It’s so they have fellow BEVVERS to socialise with while they wait together for two hours to charge their BEVs not too quickly to avoid damaging the batteries. They also get to share enlightening, heartwarming stories about how well they are saving the planet. And they MUST be friends, because fighting over chargers isn’t a very planet friendly look. Too much CO2 is emitted when you fight.
A bevvy of electric car drivers.
“Every cloud has a silver lining though. Your correspondent predicts an impending boomtime for old style garages and the market in spare parts for petrol cars for years to come.”
The Government will simply outlaw cars over a certain age, 12 years perhaps, and maybe make it illegal to sell spares apart from brake pads – all with no reference to Parliament of course.
Drugs are illegal but people get very rich selling them without too much problem.
”To eke out the range I travel everywhere with the heater off, which currently demands a substantial coat, hat and gloves.”
Yes prior to the 1970s cars required that, and many afterwards too for a number of years.
I do so love technological progress.
James May a few years back showed that the range of battery cars had barely increased since the 1890s. Yes, they are more comfortable. Yes, they go much faster….for a short while.
That’s the funniest bit for me – EV’s are not new tech. Sure lithium ion cells and 0-60 times in a few seconds is newish (and pointless day to day), however the electric BEV is over 100 years old… and we ditched them for petrol and diesel powered vehicles… until governments started bribing people with subsidies and tax breaks to start buying them again