(Berlin) German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he was ready on Friday to resume contact “when the time comes” about Ukraine with Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom he has not spoken since December.
“My last phone conversation was a while ago. But I intend when the time comes to speak with Putin again,” Scholz said in an interview published by the daily. Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger.
Regarding the resolution of the conflict, “Russia must understand that it cannot be a question of sealing a kind of cold peace, which would see the current front line become the new border between Russia and Ukraine, it would only legitimize Putin’s criminal expedition,” insisted Olaf Scholz.
“On the contrary, we must achieve a fair peace and the condition for doing so is a withdrawal of Russian troops” from Ukraine, after the invasion began in February 2022, he added.
However, he explicitly refused to say whether this withdrawal should also include Crimea, which has been occupied since 2014. The German Chancellor judged that it was up to Ukraine to define what it wants precisely.
Olaf Scholz and Vladimir Putin last spoke in December 2022, for an hour on the phone.
The head of the German government had at the time for the umpteenth time urged, without success, the Russian head of state to withdraw his troops from Ukraine, while Vladimir Putin had accused the West of carrying out “destructive” policies. .
Since then, bilateral relations have been at an all-time low. The war in Ukraine has forced Germany into a painful and spectacular diplomatic and economic about-face after having, for decades, bet in these two areas on a rapprochement with Russia.
Before the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow was Germany’s main gas supplier and one of its major oil suppliers.
Following the invasion of Ukraine, Germany also decided to invest heavily in its army. It thus broke with a long tradition of pacifism in the country, a consequence of the horrors of Nazism.