Scholz offers ‘excuses’ for his own failures – Moscow

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is trying to find excuses for his own failures, the Russian Foreign Ministry suggested on Wednesday. Moscow was responding to the speech Scholz delivered earlier this week, criticizing Russia’s foreign policy and speculating about the country’s future after the end of the conflict in Ukraine.

At a meeting of the Eastern Committee for German Business (OA), a trade association focused on relations with Eastern Europe, Scholz claimed the Russian government would need “a chance to restart economic cooperation, in another time when this is possible,” once Moscow is defeated in Ukraine. The chancellor accused President Vladimir Putin of trying to recreate a Russian empire, adding that Moscow must not win and “will not win, either,” in Ukraine.

Commenting on the chancellor’s remarks, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Moscow will never “ask” Berlin for anything, adding that German politicians “must understand this once and for all.”

Scholz effectively tried to excuse “the German government and himself for the Russian direction policy failures and the growing economic problems in the country,” the statement claimed. “Let Olaf Scholz himself be responsible for business ‘belt-tightening’ to the detriment of its own interests.”

The German chancellor “did not say a word about the admission of his predecessor, Angela Merkel, that Berlin and other Western capitals have always seen the Minsk peace agreements solely as an opportunity to get time to ready Kiev for a war against our country,” the Foreign Ministry said.

The admission that the statement referred to was made by Merkel last week, when she told Die Zeit newspaper that the September 2014 Minsk agreement brokered by France and Germany, which envisioned a roadmap out of the conflict in Ukraine’s east, was actually “an attempt to give Ukraine time.”

Merkel’s words echoed statements made earlier this year by former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko, who also acknowledged that Minsk was a ruse to buy time for a military build-up.

Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states, which have since voted to join Russia alongside with Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. Moscow also demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc.