There is an increasing appetite among European powers to engage with Russia toward ending the war in Ukraine. To that end, some suggest a mediator should facilitate negotiations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
But who might that mediator be?
More than four years after the war began, Russia has lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers, gained an increasingly decrepit economy, and failed to secure any significant military success. This leads the Europeans to foolishly believe that Putin might now be open to major concessions. But referencing the prospect of a mediator, Putin suggested last weekend that, “Of all European politicians, I would prefer talks with [former German Chancellor Gerhard] Schroeder.”
Putin is showing his very dismissive view of the European outreach here.
After all, Schroeder is an overt Russian asset, someone who long ago sold his soul to the Kremlin in order to enrich himself as a top Russian energy advisor. Ukraine would rightly regard him not simply as a wholly unreliable mediator, but as a direct proxy for Putin. The former KGB officer knows as much.
But even if Putin is floating Schroeder’s name as a joke, more serious observers are making a near equally absurd mediator suggestion of their own. It’s another former German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, who was in power from 2005 to 2021.
As the influential German magazine Der Spiegel reports, “Merkel is now also appearing in the debate [over who to appoint as mediator]… Merkel knows Putin and Zelensky personally well, she even speaks Russian… In response to a Spiegel inquiry, Merkel’s office said: ‘There are no inquiries to the former Chancellor.’”
This suggestion is utterly ridiculous, made even more so by the obvious effort of Merkel’s office to keep her name in the running. Why is it so absurd, you ask?
Spiegel hints at the answer in a statement of supreme German understatement. It notes that Merkel, “had pursued a course in the intensifying conflict between Ukraine and Russia that was considered too Moscow-friendly in retrospect.” This is like saying that President Joe Biden was, in retrospect, too old for the presidency.
Though veiled beneath a broad media delusion, the reality of Merkel’s tenure is clear. Just as she ignored Xi Jinping’s threats to international security so Germany could export cars to China, she also appeased Putin’s aggression so Germany could guzzle cheap Russian gas. The costs of this appeasement were serious and wide-ranging.
Merkel presided over the collapse of the German military, turning it into a clown show of painted broomsticks — current Chancellor Freidrich Merz is now resolving this malaise. She consistently protected Russia’s Nord Stream II gas pipeline to Europe, undermining the security of Ukraine and Germany’s allies in the Baltics, and reinforcing Putin’s energy blackmail agenda.
Merkel also repeatedly forced Ukraine into yielding to Putin following his earlier 2014 attack on the country. She even allowed the Russian chemical weapons program to operate on German soil. The good Chancellor steadfastly refuses to apologize for any of this. Only a fool would consider her a credible mediator.
Who else might do the job?
Spiegel references Finnish President Alexander Stubb as one possibility. But while Stubb would be a good pick, Putin is highly unlikely to agree to his mediation over anger at Finland’s 2023 NATO accession.
Still, the deeper issue here is that the notion of appointing a mediator is a waste of time in the first place. Putin will view this effort as a sign of European weariness and weakness. And he will continue this war until domestic political pressures force him to change course.
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In turn, to secure a just end to this war, the West must maintain support for Ukraine. The Trump administration should further demand that the aggressor rather than the victim in this war make the outsized concessions toward peace.
Patient resolution will make Putin cut a deal. Mediator Merkel will only make him toast European idiocy.