“We must do everything possible to prevent the use of nuclear weapons,” warns Angela Merkel
In an interview with the BBC, Angela Merkel reviews her policy towards Russia and defends her record focused on diplomacy. The former German chancellor believes that the war in Ukraine would have started earlier if kyiv had started the process of joining NATO in 2008. “It became clear to me that President Putin would not have stood idly by for Ukraine’s membership in NATO, she says. And at the time, Ukraine as a country certainly would not have been as prepared as it was in February 2022.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky describes this decision, carried out at the time by the Franco-German couple, as a “calculation error”.
Angela Merkel also shows her concern about the nuclear threat brandished by the Kremlin. “We must do everything we can to prevent the use of nuclear weapons,” she told the BBC. If she calls not to be “paralyzed by fear”, she recalls that Russia is one of the two largest nuclear powers in the world: “The potential is frightening.”
