German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reiterated this Sunday that Russia must abandon any plan to conquer Ukraine and respect the will of the Ukrainians in order to negotiate the end of the war.
“We will not accept a peace that the Government, Parliament and people of Ukraine cannot accept,” Scholz said at a meeting with citizens on the occasion of the opening day of the Chancellery in Berlin, according to the Spanish agency EFE.
Scholz claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin started the conflict with the “clear intention” of annexing the neighboring country in whole or in part.
With the invasion launched on February 24 this year, Putin broke a decades-old agreement in Europe not to change borders by force, the German head of government said.
Scholz said Russia must understand that Western sanctions will not be lifted until a “fair deal” with Ukraine is reached.
“But we are not there yet,” said the Social Democrat leader, who heads a coalition executive with the Greens and the Liberals.
Scholz also said he would continue to speak with Putin, although he acknowledged that talks with the Russian leader are difficult, even if they are not at “7-meter-long tables” but over the phone.
“You have to be clear and not be intimidated,” he said, referring to the long table that Putin has used in meetings with Western leaders.
Asked by a meeting participant whether the war could not have been avoided with a less belligerent stance from NATO, Scholz said that Putin had already planned the invasion of Ukraine for at least a year or two.
The German chancellor recalled that in his last conversation with Putin he said that the Russian president knew that Ukraine’s accession to NATO was not on the agenda.
He said he repeated that message at the post-meeting press conference so that Russia would not use it as an argument for war.
“With the president of Ukraine [Volodymyr Zelensky] we had an agreement on a path that would have led to the dissolution of this company,” he said, referring to the fact that everything was overcome with the outbreak of the war.
“NATO has never been a threat to Russia,” he said.
Scholz added that there was no reason for the war apart from Putin’s public declaration that Belarus and Ukraine are not real states and should belong to Russia, which he called “completely absurd”.
The war exposed Europe’s dependence on Russian energy, including Germany, which canceled the second direct gas pipeline with Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.
Scholz recently argued that reducing dependence on Russian gas implies a pipeline that transports gas from Portugal through Spain and France to the rest of Europe.
A few days after six months, the number of civilian and military casualties in the conflict is unknown, but several sources, including the UN, warn that it will be high.
The war also caused 12 million refugees and internally displaced persons.
The European Union and countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom or Japan have enacted successive packages of sanctions against Russian interests and have supplied weapons to Ukraine.
Source: Observadora
