The Chancellor by Kati Marton

Author:Kati Marton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

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During the spring and summer of 2014, Russian troops were still on the move in eastern Ukraine, inflicting thousands of casualties on both civilians and soldiers, and taking prisoners. Negotiations between Putin and Merkel had reached a standstill. Then, with a single terrible event, Putin inadvertently revived Obama’s interest in ending the conflict—and in backing up Merkel to do so.

During a rare telephone conversation with Obama on July 17, Putin broke in to say, “Mr. President, I am getting reports of an airplane crash over Ukraine…” Obama signalled aides to check with the intelligence services as he continued talking to the Russian president. By the time he hung up, Obama’s computer showed images of bodies and body parts drifting over eastern Ukraine, where Russian forces were still fighting locals. Flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 had been blown out of the sky by a Russian separatist antiaircraft missile. All 298 passengers, many en route to an AIDS conference, were killed.

The next day, the White House concluded that the plane was shot down by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile that had been launched from Russian separatist territory in eastern Ukraine. Typically, Putin responded with feigned indignation, followed by heated denials and the usual countercharges of fake news reports, Western official, and media bias. Despite his blizzard of lies, international outrage erupted against what amounted to state-sponsored terrorism. Five countries were directly affected by the tragedy: Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, Ukraine, and the Netherlands, the last of which lost the greatest number of citizens.III

The shooting down of a plane carrying civilians created a firestorm in the Obama administration and a shift in relations between Washington and Berlin. Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff, set up a hotline between himself and Peter Altmaier, his German counterpart. Having concluded earlier that engaging with Putin was a waste of time, Obama henceforth was all in—as long as Angela led the effort. From here on, the pair would be in lockstep. Obama routinely instructed aides, “Get me Angela on the phone.”

That September, at a NATO meeting in Wales, the Western alliance committed to “reinvigorate” its military and defense capacities and pledged to establish a rapid reaction force that would be permanently stationed in Eastern Europe. President Obama, back in the traditional Atlanticist mode he once shunned in favor of the pivot to Asia, pounded on the table and called on all NATO members to spend more on defense, grumbling to aides that members were “all hat and no cattle” when it came to military spending. (In her sixteen years as chancellor, Merkel did not give a single speech about Germany’s weak defenses. She understood that the topic remains unpopular, and her heart was obviously not in persuading her countrymen otherwise.)

Meanwhile, confident in her own powers of persuasion, the chancellor, with the aid of other European leaders, kept talking to Putin. That same month, in the ornate ceremonial hall of the Palace of Independence in Minsk, Belarus, Merkel and Putin hunched over a

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