Merz: Putin Wants to Restore the USSR and Will Not Stop at Ukraine
He called on Europe to unite and preserve NATO.
The Gaze reports on it according to DW.
Friedrich Merz said that Putin will not stop at Ukraine, wants to restore the USSR and poses a military threat to the former Soviet states. The chancellor called on Europe to unite and preserve NATO.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin will not stop at Ukraine in his aggressive foreign policy. ‘Putin will not stop. And if Ukraine falls, he will not stop,’ the chancellor said on Saturday, 13 December, in Munich at the party congress of the Christian Social Union (CSU), which, together with his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), forms the governing coalition.
Merz said that Putin is interested in ‘fundamentally changing the borders in Europe’ and restoring the Soviet Union within its former borders. This, in his opinion, poses ‘a huge threat, including a military one, to countries that were once part of this empire.’
Merz drew an analogy with 1938. Therefore, the German Chancellor continued, further assistance to Ukraine and European unity in strategic cooperation with the United Kingdom are priorities in foreign and security policy. It is also important to ‘preserve NATO for as long as possible,’ whose effectiveness has been repeatedly questioned by US President Donald Trump.
In terms of policy towards Russia, Merz believes that the hasty entry of several states into the First World War in 1914 is an incorrect historical analogy. ‘It would probably be more correct to use 1938 as a historical analogy,’ Merz said, according to Reuters. Then, Merz continued, after the Munich Agreement, Adolf Hitler saw that his imperial expansionist ambitions were being reinforced by the appeasement policy of European states, and a year later he started World War II.
Looking at events in the US, China and Russia, Merz noted ‘an almost tectonic shift in global political and economic centres of power.’ Germans and Europeans are ‘right in the middle of this process’ and, like the US, must defend their interests, the chancellor believes.
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