Eldar Mamedov
Angela Merkel, the eternal pragmatist, has chosen her moment. In a recent interview to Hungarian media, the former German chancellor pointed a finger at Baltic and Polish leaders for their alleged role in “undermining” a potential EU-Russia dialogue before the war.
Whatever one thinks of her legacy, Merkel has an unmatched sense of political timing. Her statement is not a historical aside; it is the opening salvo in Europe’s looming blame game for the impending defeat in Ukraine.
Her comments land at the precise moment the foundational assumptions of Europe’s Ukraine policy are collapsing. On the battlefield, Russian forces are now grinding out slow, but steady gains. In the United States, Donald Trump keeps insisting that this is “Biden’s war,” not his, and that it should end.
While Trump no longer appears to be cajoling Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky into accepting some of Russia Vladimir Putin’s terms, his current position — selling arms to Ukraine funded by Europe — does not satisfy the Europeans as they face increasing economic and fiscal difficulties. Europe finds itself holding a bill it cannot pay and for a war it cannot win — and a war whose strategic direction is being dictated from Washington, not Brussels.
This transatlantic shift is starkly evident in the recent flurry of activity between Trump and Zelensky. Their key topic is the potential provision of U.S. "Tomahawk" cruise missiles to Ukraine. This is a quintessential Trumpian gambit — escalation as a tool for deal-making — but Trump himself does not appear to have decided on the deliveries as he acknowledges this would represent a major escalation. Europe, meanwhile, is left entirely to lobby Trump to make “Biden’s war” his own which highlights the ultimate failure of its own policies.
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