In her memoir, the former German Chancellor considers it “illusory” to think that putting Ukraine on the path to NATO membership “would have protected it from Putin’s aggression
Angela Merkel justifies her refusal to allow Ukraine to join NATO in 2008 by saying that it would have been “playing with fire” to ignore Russia’s opposition. The MEP considers it “illusory” to think that putting Ukraine on the path to joining NATO “would have protected it from Putin’s aggression and that this status would have acted as a deterrent, or that Putin would have accepted these developments lightly.” This is one of the revelations made in “Freedom: Memories 1954 – 2021”, the memoir by the four-time German chancellor, excerpts of which were published by the weekly Die Zeit on Wednesday.
Merkel was heavily criticized for resisting efforts at the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008 to offer Ukraine and Georgia a concrete timetable, known as a “membership action plan” (MAP). The chancellor said at the time that giving MAP status to the two former Soviet republics would have been a promise of NATO membership that could hardly be reversed.
In the book, Angela Merkel claims that the main reason for blocking Ukraine’s membership was that the Russian Black Sea Fleet was still stationed in Crimea, the peninsula that was controlled by Kiev until annexation by Moscow in 2014. “It was unprecedented that a candidate for NATO was so closely linked to Russian military structures,” he writes. “Furthermore, at the time, only a minority of the Ukrainian population supported NATO membership: the country was deeply divided.”
Merkel says it would have been “playing with fire” to discuss MAP status for Ukraine and Georgia without analyzing the situation from the perspective of Putin, who made it clear that he wanted to restore Russia’s great power status. The German considers that Putin is “always ready to hand out punishments” and is not interested in building “democratic structures”.
The Bucharest summit ended with a compromise. Ukraine and Georgia did not obtain MAP status, but the alliance agreed that “these countries will become members of NATO”.
