"Chancellor Merkel admits the Minsk agreement was merely to buy time for Ukraine’s arms build-up"

According to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Minsk agreement served to buy time to rearm Ukraine. “The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time,” Merkel told the weekly Die Zeit. “It also used this time to become stronger, as you can see today.”

Merkel, who was also leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has made few public statements since she was replaced as chancellor by Olaf Scholz (Social Democratic Party, SPD) a year ago, after sixteen years in office. The extensive interview published by Die Zeit on December 7 is a rare exception.

Behind the scenes, however, Merkel remains politically active. In her office, to which she is entitled as a former chancellor, she employs nine people, four more than approved—an office manager, a deputy manager, two desk officers, three clerks and two drivers. She maintains regular contact with Scholz, as he himself has reported. She had already cultivated a good relationship with him when he was still finance minister in the grand coalition government.

All the more remarkable is her admission that the Minsk agreement served to buy time for Ukraine’s rearmament. “It was clear to all of us that this was a frozen conflict, that the problem had not been solved, but that is precisely what gave Ukraine valuable time,” Merkel told Die Zeit.

Previously, the Minsk agreement, which Merkel signed together with then-French President François Hollande, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin in September 2014, had been portrayed as an effort towards peace that the Russian president had allegedly later thwarted.

Now, Merkel confirms that NATO wanted war from the start but needed time to prepare militarily—an assessment WSWS has long held.