Angry People Buy Merkel Lies, Criticize My Dear Vladimir Putin

Merkel says she was running 5D rings around Putin, I say she's gaslighting

Once hailed as THE Western leader, the right-thinking dominatrix that would keep Trump in check

Angela Merkel has declared that in 2014 when she helped the signing of the Minsk Agreement she was really playing 5D chess against Putin, and people are so angry with the man that they believe it.

Merkel claims she primarily intended Minsk to buy time for Ukraine for the almost inevitable round 2:

"The 2014 Minsk Agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time. They used that time to become stronger, as we can see today. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not the Ukraine of today.”

”As we could see in the fighting near Debaltsevo in 2015, Russia could have easily won then. And I very much doubt that NATO countries could have done then as much as they do now to help Ukraine.”

“It was clear to all of us that this was a frozen conflict, that the problem was not solved, but that is what gave Ukraine precious time.”

This is trash. Merkel is reframing Minsk with the benefit of hindsight. Nobody at the time knew round 2 would surely come. Even as late as November 2021 this war seemed unthinkble. If Merkel alone knew better then why did she build Nord Stream 2?

A restart of the war carried a high risk of making economic Russia ties untennable for Berlin, yet she went and made additional investments into them. Why??

This is pure gaslighting.

Everything looks inevitable in hindsight. Doesn’t mean that it was. Or that anyone knew it.

Nobody at the time knew round 2 would surely come. And nobody thought that any amount of preparation by Ukraine stood a chance of altering the final outcome if Russia wanted a result badly enough.

TNG5 @TNG512

@marmar_ae @powerfultakes As late as March 5, US government officials were anonymously talking to the media about plans to set up a government-in-exile and coordinate a Ukrainian resistance movement "after the Russians establish control". Not *if*, *after*.

washingtonpost.comU.S. and allies quietly prepare for a Ukrainian government-in-exile and a long insurgencyThe U.S. and its allies are planning for a Ukrainian government-in-exile and fueling a long insurgency against a Russian occupation and whatever puppet regime Moscow installs if the Kremlin establishes military control.

Let’s not allow politicians to get away with trying to hack our memories like this. In the run up to the war the US still expected Ukraine to quickly fall and was preparing to back an insurgency, rather than a conventional war.

So actually the West didn’t think that 8 years of Ukrainian preparations was all that game-changing. It would drive up costs for Russia, but wouldn’t alter the outcome.

Marko Marjanović @marmar_ae

Have we really forgotten that earlier this year the US expected Kiev to last 4 days and to then bankroll a guerrila-terrorism campaign?

Marko Marjanović @marmar_ae

Or are we just playing dumb so we can dunk on the botox fool and scream foul at Merkel?

I understand the anger. I was pointing out Putin’s blunders before it was popular. I get the growing disillusionment with the man. But there is legitimate critique and then there is piling on out of pure angry reflex.

Merkel — after she bought this “precious time” for Ukraine — what did she do to actually help Ukraine prepare? She didn’t do anything.

And for all intents and purposes, neither did the US and NATO.

The meme that Ukraine had a “NATO-trained” army that the Americans had built for it over 8 years is an undignified Putinbot 2022 cope to cover up how badly Kremlin botched the invasion plan. (Go read the Putin fan club in 2021 if they thought that UA army was a beast — they didn’t.)

On the contrary, the US resisted the impulse to arm up Ukraine. Over 8 years just a few billion in military assistance was sent.

Why is that? Because the Americans quite reasonably calculated that the aid could provoke the Russians into attacking, but wouldn’t be enough to stop them. — As was the conventional wisdom at the time and what all of us believed. (We weren’t wrong either, we just didn’t have know how badly the Kremlin would botch it.)

Now Merkel is saying that she alone knew better and was already playing 5D chess against hapless Putin way back then. What a laugh.

• If true that she thought round 2 was inevitable then why did she build Nord Stream 2?

• If true that she thought winning some precious time for Ukraine was so important, then why didn’t she do anything to help Ukrainian rearmament and make better use of that time?

• If her bet was on winning time for Kiev to allow it to resist, then why did the West earlier this year still belive Ukraine would be promptly defeated?

Facts do not fit the tale. Independently of whether going for Minsk was a good idea or not (with hindsight it obviously wasn’t but Russia’s goals at the time were much different), nobody was running 5D rings around Putin in 2014, least of all Merkel.

You see, I am not a Putin hater at all. I am perfectly willing to take his side when he does good.

I have done it for the cringe America-worshipper Bolsonaro and the nasty neocon DeSantis, so why wouldn’t I do it for a rare fellow pan-Slavist like Putin? It is just that lately he has been giving me very little material to work with.

Come on Puty, give me some good stuff!

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