[Skybird]

FOCUS writes:
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Putin, Putin, Putin: Although Angela Merkel only wanted to make "feel-good" appointments in her political retirement, the former chancellor never misses an opportunity to talk about Russia and the Kremlin tsar. There are good reasons for this.

At the beginning of June, six months after leaving the chancellery, Angela Merkel made her first public appearance as former chancellor at the presentation of a small anthology of her speeches. There she cautiously approached her new role. She was "not a completely normal citizen" and therefore had to continue to be careful about expressing herself. "It's not my job to comment from the sidelines," she stressed: "I'm still looking for my way."

Now, it is a well-known fact that good intentions are not always long-lasting. Merkel does make comments on current politics, especially on Putin and Russia. For she is undoubtedly not pleased that Germany's extreme dependence on Russian gas - with all the unforeseeable consequences for the population and the economy - is attributed not least to her policies.

In any case, it was not to be expected that Merkel would be completely politically abstinent. Like all former heads of government, she is probably concerned with her own image in the history books. The CDU politician, who is emphatically unpretentious, would never say that. But her announcement that she and her long-time office manager Beate Baumann are writing a book about her life in the GDR and her chancellorship speaks precisely to this.

It is also noticeable that Merkel, who once described the internet as uncharted territory, obviously feels comfortable on the net. At any rate, she has had her own homepage there since the beginning of July: www.buero-bundeskanzlerin-ad.de . Anyone who wants to know which interviews the former chancellor has given, which speeches she has delivered, which statements she has made, will find what they are looking for here. It is a digital chronicle of the ex-chancellor's activities.

One thing is clear from Merkel's public statements to date: at present, the main concern here is to present her policy towards Vladimir Putin and Russia as if it had been - to use her favourite vocabulary - without alternative. She would "not apologise" for this policy, she had already declared at her first public appearance. Nor did she ever believe "that Putin would be changed by trade". She had known how he thought and had always tried to prevent an escalation.

The ex-chancellor avoids any verbal sharpness when talking about Putin. Putin, Putin, Putin: The former Chancellor never misses an opportunity to talk about Russia and the Kremlin tsar, while avoiding any verbal sharpness. This could be observed twice last week, when Merkel spoke at the first event of the newly founded "Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl Foundation" in Berlin and at the "1,100-year town anniversary" in Goslar.

In Berlin, she could have left it at paying tribute to Kohl's services to unity. In Goslar, on the other hand, the eventful history of Goslar, the founding of the CDU in 1950 in this former mining town, and her relationship with her former Vice-Chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, an honorary citizen of Goslar, provided enough material. But in both speeches, the Ukraine war and its consequences played a major role.

In Berlin, Merkel tried to defend her Russia policy - citing Kohl. Her thesis: in all measures against the aggressor Putin, Kohl would always make sure to return to "business as usual" after the end of the war with Russia.
Merkel is no longer in office - but far from gone

In Goslar, she pleaded for "working on a pan-European security architecture involving Russia within the framework of the principles of international law", even if this would require "a very long breath". Merkel's "bitter realisation of 24 February": "As long as we have not achieved this (...) the Cold War is not really over either; worse still, it has become a real war for the people in Ukraine."

But after the invasion of Ukraine, her policy towards Russia - also with regard to natural gas supplies - appears in a different light. Although the former German Chancellor had announced that in her political retirement she would only attend "feel-good" appointments: She also takes on the unwieldy topic of Putin and works hard to ensure that her policies are interpreted positively in retrospect.

The conclusion: the former chancellor is no longer in office - but she is far from gone.
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Unfortunately.
A real huge fly swatter may come handy.