Friday 19th November 2021
Meeting with NATO Secretary General
Merkel: Relations with Russia cooled down
In one of the last crises during her term in office, Chancellor Merkel was once again asked to give everything. A meeting with the NATO Secretary General deals with the Belarusian-Polish border, but also with Ukraine. Lukashenko and Putin have meanwhile phoned Merkel.
While the new Corona resolutions are at stake in domestic politics today, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to have a lot of foreign policy skills today, as well as in the past few days. Before speaking with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in Berlin, Merkel expressed concern about the relationship with Russia. You have always advocated a dialogue between NATO and Russia, she said. “Unfortunately, there has been a cooling off at the moment.” There are “great contradictions, but it is always better to talk to one another than not to speak”.
Regarding the situation on the Belarusian-Polish border, Stoltenberg said: “The situation is very worrying.” The Belarusian government uses innocent people and that is cynical and inhuman. NATO stands in full solidarity with all affected allies.
Meanwhile, Polish border guards arrested 45 more migrants on the border with Belarus. A spokeswoman for the authority said the next day that they tried to cross the border on Thursday evening. According to the report, a group of around 500 people from the Belarusian side threw stones at Polish officials and sprayed tear gas. At the same time, “Belarusian officials” tried to blind their Polish colleagues with lasers. Poland’s Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak told Polsat that the groups were much smaller than in the past few days, when around a hundred migrants tried to get over the border fence at once.
“We remain vigilant”
Stoltenberg announced further NATO support for Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. “We remain vigilant and ready to continue helping our allies.” Individual countries announced that they would send armed forces to help. The British government wants to send more soldiers to Poland. British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace told the BBC that pioneers would be sent to provide technical support. From circles of the Ministry of Defense in London it was said that around 100 soldiers should be deployed. At the request of the government, Estonia also wants to send around 100 members of its armed forces to Warsaw. Among them are pioneers and military police, said the Estonian Defense Minister Kalle Laanet in Tallinn.
Russia’s head of state Vladimir Putin has called the Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko again. The Kremlin announced that it was also about Lukashenko’s phone call with Chancellor Angela Merkel. The CDU politician had spoken to Lukashenko twice this week to urge a better humanitarian situation for migrants on the Belarusian-Polish border.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made it clear to the Interfax agency that Putin’s talks with Lukashenko were not enough to “find a solution to this crisis”. It is important to continue contacts between Lukashenko and EU representatives.
For her phone calls with Lukashenko, Merkel was sharply criticized, especially from the Polish side. Representatives of the national-conservative PiS government in Warsaw described this as “not a good step”. Poland’s President Andrei Duda said his country would not accept any agreements “made over our heads”.
Poland’s former President Aleksander Kwasniewski has now defended Merkel against criticism from his country of her phone calls with the Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko. “You would not have started these talks if a solution had not been sought in the European Council,” Kwasniewski told radio station RMF. He does not believe that Merkel acted over the heads of the Poles and the Baltic states.