Berlin: German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin are set to hold talks in Moscow on Friday amid the crisis unfolding in Afghanistan and as Russia’s treatment of opposition politician Alexei Navalny and Ukraine remain a source of ongoing tension between the two leaders’ countries.
Other challenging issues that are certain to play a role in the meeting are a gas pipeline between Russia and Germany opposed by the United States, the repression of dissent in Belarus, and allegations that the Belarusian government has channeled migrants into Latvia, Lithuania and Poland with the aim of destabilizing the European Union.
Merkel’s visit to Moscow comes as the chancellor is nearing the end of her almost 16-year-long leadership of Germany. She and Putin, who has served as Russia’s president or prime minister since 2000, managed to maintain a line of communication over the years despite their many political differences.
However, the personal relationship between the two has deteriorated since 2014, when Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and backed separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine, and as a result of other authoritarian actions by Moscow.
Friday’s talks in Moscow will “surely be about the big outstanding international questions,” Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters in Berlin earlier this week. “Obviously Afghanistan. Furthermore, the conflict in eastern Ukraine, for the solution and settlement of which Russia could do much more.”
“Belarus, a country, a dictator, who goes against his own people in the worst kind of way and on whom the Russian leadership has influence as we believe,” Seibert added as he listed possible talking points.
Merkel is heading to Russia on the anniversary of Navalny falling gravely ill while on a plane flying over Siberia on Aug. 20, 2020. At his wife’s insistence, the opposition leader was transferred for medical treatment to Germany, where officials said tests revealed he had been poisoned with a Soviet-developed nerve agent.
Navalny, who is Putin’s most outspoken critic, spent five months in Germany recovering and blamed the poisoning on the Kremlin. Russian authorities have rejected the accusation.
Upon his return to Russia in January, Navalny was immediately arrested and jailed. A month later, he was ordered to serve 2½ years in prison for violating the terms of a suspended sentence from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that he dismissed as politically motivated. Arab News
