Russian policy legacy burdens German president Steinmeier

German president Frank Walter Steinmeier has had little reason for cheer this year, so his smile was particularly broad this week in New York during what he called “a really great evening in my life”.

Steinmeier was in town to receive the Henry Kissinger Prize and be praised by its name-giver, the 99-year-old former US secretary of state, as a “true friend” and “reliable ally”.

It was a change from all the names, many unprintable, that Steinmeier has been called this year.

As one of the last active veterans of the Schröder and Merkel eras – in which he served as chief of staff and foreign minister respectively – Steinmeier has felt the full force of Ukrainian fury at Germany since Russia’s invasion last February.

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For Kyiv Steinmeier, like few other German politicians, characterises the “spiders’ web” of political, diplomatic and business ties that Berlin spun to Moscow.

In Kyiv’s reading, these ties – including a second undersea gas pipeline agreed with Moscow months after Russia annexed Crimea – came at Ukraine’s expense, left Germany overly dependent on Russian energy and emboldened Vladimir Putin to invade.

Ask for other examples and they point to remarks they say echo Russia’s justification for the war. In 2016 at the Boris Yeltsin University in Yekaterinburg, Steinmeier defended a sovereign state’s right to its national borders but also expressed understanding for states worried about their ethnic minorities living elsewhere. Mentioning Ukraine by name, Steinmeier added: “When states demand other states respect their sovereignty, then they must ensure that the rights of the people within their borders are protected.”

When Steinmeier planned a visit to Ukraine last April, Kyiv, in a striking snub, dubbed him persona non grata and subsequently delayed his visit to October.

Several times in the last months Steinmeier has publicly acknowledged his own mistakes in public, but still struggles to explain why he made them.

Last April in Der Spiegel magazine, he acknowledged not realising just how far Putin had moved from their first meeting in 2001 – when the Russian leader spoke in German of Goethe, freedom and democracy – to their last “chilly” Moscow meeting in 2017, dominated by Putin’s arguments over the “dominance of the West”.

“To be honest, I still hoped that Vladimir Putin would remain rational,” he told Der Spiegel. “I did not assume that the Russian president would risk the total political, economic, moral ruin of his country in an imperial frenzy.”

He expanded his thinking in a Berlin speech last month, repeated in New York this week, that perhaps Germany’s “own good fortune” – unification in 1990 and the “retreat of Soviet troops without firing a shot” – had left it blind to reality.

“We counted on the conviction that we were surrounded by friends and that war, at least in Europe, had become inconceivable,” he said. “Freedom and democracy seemed to be gaining ground everywhere, trade and prosperity seemed possible in every direction.”

Not everyone is convinced. A recent foreign press interview with Steinmeier turned frosty – on both sides – when it became clear that not everyone in the room was convinced by what one correspondent later dubbed the president’s “optimism-naive narrative”.

Some foreign policy analysts think the war has exposed Germany’s societal “transformation-through-trade” approach to Russia for what they say it always was.

“German engagement in Russia doesn’t look naive or mistaken, it seems to have been about ruthless realpolitik and enrichment,” said Dr Roderick Parkes of the German Council on Foreign Relations.

In the German media, the customary respect for the head of state is draining away at speed. One daily newspaper attacked a recent presidential address as filled with “baroque sentences and fussy language”.

ZDF public television said the president’s clear language in that speech vis-a-vis Russia – “we are opponents” – evaporated when he turned to Germany’s prior Russian policy, which he shaped like few others.

On Friday, Wolfgang Schäuble, a Merkel-era finance minister and Bundestag president, conceded he was angry at himself for not seeing the danger from Russia.

“We didn’t want to see it,” he told the Handelsblatt business daily, “and that applies to everyone.”

While ex-chancellor Angela Merkel insists she is “not reproaching” herself over Russia, Schäuble added: “It’s remarkable that, on Russia, she cannot say that we made mistakes.”