Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has recalled in her memoirs the occasion when, during a meeting, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, He released his dog even though he knew that politics feared these animals: “He showed the public, on another level, how he intended to send signals,” he maintains in its pages.
“From the first time I met him as chancellor, in January 2006, I knew that he was afraid of dogs because at the beginning of 1995, in the Uckermark (region), I was bitten by one,” Merkel confesses in his autobiography Freedompublished next Tuesday and of which this Saturday the newspaper The Republic take some extracts.
The former chancellor explained that her diplomats had conveyed to the Russian president’s team her desire not to have dogs during their meetings. “In 2006, in Moscow, he had respected our request although he did not deprive himself of a small evil: in fact, He brought me a special gift, a big stuffed dog.and when he handed it to me he assured that he wouldn’t bite,” the former president recalled.
However, things changed a year later, in 2007, when Merkel met the Russian president’s farmer “in the flesh”Koni, during a meeting at his residence in Sochi.
“As Putin and I posed for photographers sitting on the couches before the meeting, I tried to ignore the animal, even though it wandered around me. Putin’s expression clearly said (at least to me) that I found the situation funny“he confesses.
Merkel maintains that this action was an attempt by the Russian president to “send signals” to the world: “Putin showed the public, on another level, how he intended to send signals, if necessary with the help of his black labrador, Koni, who he frequently had at his side when receiving foreign guests,” he says.
“Did I just want to see how a person in trouble reacts? Was it a small show of power? I just thought about not losing my cool, concentrating on the photographers, it will pass. When I finished the meeting, I did not discuss the subject with Putin and limited myself , as I often do, to the rule of the English aristocracy: ‘never explain, never complain,'” the politician writes in her memoirs.
The politician, chancellor of Germany between 2005 and 2021 and one of the protagonists of European politics in that period, confesses that the Russian leader already gave her a glimpse in 2006, almost two decades ago, his intentions to remain in powerr.
Specifically, he remembers a moment with Putin in a car to an airport in Siberia in April 2006, after a business forum, when he told him that the Russian Constitution allowed re-election after two terms if the candidate “takes a break.”
“The message I received from Putin’s few words, that spring day in Siberia, as we headed to an airport, left no doubt: ‘Keep in mind that I remain, although next year after two terms I will leave office to a successor as the Constitution wants. I will return, it will be just a pause,'” Merkel understood from her talk with the Russian president (in 2008 his right-hand man, Dmitri Medvedev, would succeed him until 2012, when he returned to power).
Likewise, the German recalls that Putin used to consider the end of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” and that already in those years he lamented the United States defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic.
