From LRT:
"‘Missed opportunity to be quiet’: Merkel's interview sparks backlash in Lithuania
Baltic officials responded in uproar over what they saw as Angela Merkel, the former German leader, blaming the three countries and Poland for blocking Europe’s contacts with the Kremlin that partly led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
"In June 2021, I felt that Putin was no longer taking the Minsk Agreement seriously," she said in reference to the failed peace talks that froze the conflict between Kyiv and Russian-led separatists in the country’s east.
Merkel said that the refusal by the Baltic states and Poland to permit direct talks with the Kremlin following the 2014 aggression against Ukraine led, in part, to Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
"That's why I wanted a new format where we could speak directly with Putin as the European Union," she said, adding that "not everyone supported this, above all the Baltic states, but Poland was also against it". They were "afraid", she said, that there would be no collective agreement among EU states on how to tackle Russia.
The interview with the Hungarian media outlet, Partizan, sparked backlash in the Baltic states and Poland.
Linas Linkevicius, the Lithuanian foreign minister at the time, said Merkel "missed an opportunity to be quiet".
In a post on Facebook, the current ambassador to Sweden said "there are certain types of people – and politicians are also people – who are never wrong”, adding that Merkel’s opposition to granting a NATO membership plan to Georgia and Ukraine in 2008 enabled the Kremlin’s aggression.
“Russia felt free to act as if it had been given permission to do whatever it wanted in its own ‘backyard’. It was one of many wake-up calls that the West simply ignored,” he said.
“The chancellor’s responsibility for those historical mistakes has not diminished in the slightest – especially when, recklessly and without justification, she blames those who at least tried to stop those errors,” said Linkevičius.
“Many who remember it all are still alive,” he added.
According to Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s former foreign minister, Merkel’s remarks were “a case of inverted logic”, when someone attempts to “find someone else to blame” for their mistakes.
Drawing on his experience of dealing with the former German chancellor, Landsbergis recalled when Lithuania was plunged into a migration crisis after the Minsk regime channeled thousands of migrants toward the Baltics and Poland in response to EU sanctions.
At the time, Lithuania requested greater EU funding and sanctions against Belarus. However, Merkel decided to negotiate directly with the authoritarian Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, behind Lithuania’s back, Landsbergis said.
“Without informing us, she spoke with Lukashenko and began, on her own initiative, to form some kind of agreement,” the former foreign minister said. “I remember saying that if Lithuania is under attack, then perhaps such contacts should first be coordinated with us? But it didn’t seem to make any impression on her.”
According to Landsbergis, Merkel greatly overestimated her influence over Putin.
“The appeasement strategy didn’t work in 1938, and it doesn’t work now,” he said, drawing a parallel with the Second World War..."
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Landsbergis also wrote in X: "Say what you want about Merkel's legacy, at least she finally admitted whose side she was on."
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