rfmcdonald | [LINK] "Putin Has Destroyed Europe Trust in Russia: German Envoy" (Reply)

Bloomberg's Indira A.R. Lakshmanan notes the continuing breakdown in Russia-European Union relations, as stated by the German ambassador to the United States.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression toward Ukraine has destroyed Europe’s trust in Russia, leaving politicians and businesspeople feeling that “we are not partners anymore,” German Ambassador to the U.S. Peter Wittig said.

“A lot of trust was destroyed by Putin’s policy,” Wittig said at a Bloomberg Government lunch in Washington yesterday. “And I think it’s a challenge to regain that trust.”

Germany was Russia’s biggest trading partner after China last year, with 6,000 German companies that have commercial ties with Russia, netting $88 billion in trade between the two nations, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

While it wasn’t in the self-interest of German industry to support economic sanctions to punish Russia for dividing Ukraine, “the leadership of the business world made it clear that Putin didn’t leave us any other choice,” Wittig said.

[. . .]

At the start of this year, “nobody had anticipated that Putin would take such a momentous decision” to seize Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and back armed separatists in eastern Ukraine, creating a rift between Russia and the U.S. and its European allies that “would take us back to a Europe before 1989” and the demise of the Soviet Union, said Wittig, who previously served as Germany’s ambassador to the United Nations.

“Now we are asking ourselves” about the future of “East-West” relations, Witting said. “Putin has signaled that he has renounced” the “partnership that we had.”

In Berlin yesterday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel invoked the 40-year history of communist East Germany as an historical example, saying the EU and the U.S. may be in for a “long haul” in their face-off with Russia, and that there’s no reason for the allies to soften their demands on Putin.