Placed in a politically awkward spot by Russia's war against Ukraine, and now bearing the brunt of the European Union refugee crisis, Germany has come in for criticism recently, not least from Ukrainians.
The EU economic powerhouse has been lambasted in Ukraine for taking a non-confrontational approach to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s revanchist, break the rules, war-mongering foreign policy.
In response, German experts argue that, without German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s principled strategy in trying to solve the crisis, Ukraine would have been worse off.
According to Stefan Meister of the German Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank, Germany was the only EU state that took on a leadership role from the outset of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
“I think that without Germany it would be much worse… (because) without German leadership there would be no sanctions, or there would be much weaker sanctions on Russia,” Meister said. “There would also be much less unity among the EU member states.”
And German experts said Ukrainians shouldn’t read too much into Merkel’s handshakes with Putin and outwardly friendly manner.
Joerg Forbrig, a German Marshall Fund fellow concentrating on Central and Eastern Europe, said that Merkel has long been suspicious of Putin and his policies. “I think she has no illusions about Putin. She understands fully that he is basically an autocrat that is in many ways leading his country to disaster.”
For a German leader, Merkel’s leadership has been tough, Meister said. “She is criticized a lot over here, inside of the country, by other parties but also by the public, for being too tough on Russia.”
That toughness has mainly manifested itself in Merkel’s arm-twisting other EU countries into imposing and keeping moderate economic sanctions on Russia.
But finding unity at home is also a major challenge for Merkel, where opposition comes from both ends of the political spectrum. Far-left and far-right political parties support Putin for various reasons, while Merkel has faced pushback from German businesses that oppose any sanctions at all.
The German chancellor’s response also has its limitations. Just like the United States, Germany has repeatedly said it will not provide any weapons to Ukraine to help the country fend off further attacks from Russia. If Germany were to provide independent military aid to Ukraine, the West’s unity could disintegrate, Forbrig said.
“As soon as we lose that unity we will have lost to Putin,” Forbrig said. “And if we put it at risk by sending military supplies to Ukraine at this stage, then at the end of the day we would all be worse off.”
Russia, on the other hand, doesn’t have that much economic leverage to influence Germany. Bilateral trade, which was modest even before the sanctions, has decreased from around 3.5 percent of Germany’s foreign trade down to 2 percent. “Germany exports more to Poland than to Russia,” Forbrig said.
The same is true when it comes to Russia’s natural gas exports to Germany. Though Russia supplies one third of the gas Germany consumes, that only makes up 7 percent of Germany’s energy consumption, Forbrig said.
During the G-20 summit on Nov. 15, Western leaders reaffirmed that sanctions will remain in place until Russia fully meets the Minsk peace agreements, whose deadlines have been pushed back into next year.
But Putin needs permanent conflict in order to justify his continued rule in Russia, and it is relatively easy for him to shift those conflicts – as he did from Ukraine to Syria. “Obviously, there’s a good chance of the conflict flaring up again, because it’s not resolved, it’s only been put on pause,” Forbrig said.
That lull may have already come to an end, with recent attacks by Russian proxy forces in the Donbas killing at least nine soldiers in recent days.
While the supply of offensive weapons is out of the question, Meister believes that Germany could do more by boosting Ukraine’s defense capabilities, such as delivering military communications equipment and anti-artillery radar systems.
As for providing more financial aid, Meister said that this should be done predominately via the EU and International Monetary Fund, and not individual states.
“What the EU can do is to put tough conditions (on aid) in terms of the reform process and in terms of fighting corruption,” Meister said. If these conditions are met, the EU should then provide more financial and advisory support.
The German experts also said they shared the skepticism in Ukraine about the Minsk peace agreements.
“I think it’s a mistake for (Minsk) to be the main political initiative we have at the moment on Ukraine,” Meister said. The lack of clarity of the Minsk agreements makes them difficult to implement as the main ‘roadmap’ for navigating through bilateral relations, he said.
And while ending Russia’s war on Ukraine is important, Germany should mainly focus on the reform process in Ukraine, as corruption is still prevalent in Kyiv, Meister said.
Germany still has a somewhat positive view of President Petro Poroshenko because of his moves against the oligarch system, Meister said. But even so, the Ukrainian president’s progress has been very slow, and many Germans view Poroshenko’s attempts to fight the oligarchs as a personal battle rather than an effort to make systematic changes to the system.
“It looks more like a typical post-Soviet Ukrainian fight between different groups, where the president tries to bring certain groups under his control,” he said.
Germany’s main frustrations are with Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, who is “seen less and less as really being a person who will shape the future of Ukrainian politics.” His already limited support in Germany is decreasing even more, Meister said. The prime minister “always makes very strong statements, but the implementation is lacking.”
It’s not all bad news: Despite the slow changes in Ukraine, Germany’s image of the country has fundamentally shifted since the EuroMaidan Revolution back in 2013-2014, Forbrig says.
He said that countries like Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus used to be seen in Germany more as “appendices” to Russia, whereas today Ukraine is seen, more than ever before, as an actual independent actor.
Recent public opinion polls show Germans’ trust in Russia plummeting from 40 percent to just 15 percent. In contrast, more than 70 percent of Germans are in favor of providing political and economic support to Ukraine and more than half of Germans now support Ukraine’s EU membership.
“Now this is significant because until the beginning of the Ukraine crisis very few Germans had Ukraine on their screens. I mean, few people would be able to find it on the map; hardly anybody knew anything about this country,” Forbrig said.
And this shift in Germany’s perception of eastern Europe is likely to be long-lasting.
“This is not going to be reversed easily,” Forbrig said.
Kyiv Post staff writer Ilya Timtchenko can be reached at [email protected].
