Vladimir Putin does not need Germany to become pro-Russian. He needs something much easier: for Germany to become tired. But if Germany doesn’t become tired, then Putin needs viable relations with Germany. At present, Putin is pursuing the making Germany tired outcome by prolonging the war in Ukraine. This he does by raising its economic and political costs, exploiting divisions over sanctions and military aid in Europe, and betting that public frustration will eventually weaken Berlin’s willingness to support Ukraine.
For years, Moscow has had reason to believe that exhaustion across Europe might eventually do what Russian military power could not do. Ukraine would keep fighting, the costs would accumulate, European voters would grow impatient, German industry would complain, maybe also its neighbours, and a government in Berlin would eventually discover the virtues of John Mearsheimer’s “offensive realism”. What that refers to is the unsentimental proposition that great powers seek dominance because no higher authority can guarantee their security, leaving smaller states to discover that their sovereignty is often constrained by geography and power. In this case the supposed great power is Russia — though President Obama rightly called it a regional power, not a global power.
While a lot of vocabulary is flying around at the moment about being diplomatic, ceasefire, compromise, negotiations, and the like, Putin’s underlying bargain is simpler. Ukraine would surrender enough territory to make the war stop, Europe would begin normalising relations with Moscow, and Germany could get back to business (including with Russia). However, in that bargain, peace is not the objective, instead it is the glorification of the Russian invasion (and conquest in part or whole) of Ukraine being converted into legitimacy itself.
One big problem though! Friedrich Merz, the Chancellor of Germany, is dangerous to that Russian strategy because he refuses its very premise. He treats Russia’s war not principally as a humanitarian tragedy occurring somewhere to Germany’s east (though does recognise that tragedy), but as a test of the European security order in which Germany itself lives. If borders can be altered by invasion, if occupation can become legitimate merely by lasting long enough, then the settlement that ends the shooting in Ukraine may simply determine where the next European crisis begins. This is why Merz’s language about Putin has been unusually severe. In 2025, he called the Russian president “perhaps the most serious war criminal of our time”; the Kremlin responded that Merz’s views on negotiations could scarcely be taken into account. That was really a response of fear.
That exchange revealed something though. Moscow presented Merz’s hostility as evidence that he was irrelevant to diplomacy. But this does not work because dismissing a difficult counterpart does not make his objections disappear; it merely reveals how dependent Moscow’s preferred diplomacy is on others first accepting its premises. Another interpretation of the exchange is more interesting: Merz is difficult precisely because he will not accept the conceptual framework on which Moscow prefers negotiations to begin. He does not regard Russian possession of occupied Ukrainian territory as an unfortunate fact that Europe must eventually convert into a legitimate settlement. He sees the territorial demand itself as part of the problem.
Some of this may reflect temperament, but it is a useful temperament to have. Merz is a lawyer, and briefly served as a judge before spending decades in legal practice and business. He was a partner and later senior counsel at the international law firm Mayer Brown before returning to the centre of German politics. He tends to speak about international politics in ways that resemble legal argument: What is the rule? Who violated it? What precedent follows if the violation is rewarded? The world of geopolitics is not a courtroom, of course. International law itself is really a curious combination of law and geopolitics. But what is critically important is that Merz appears unusually resistant, arguably very resistant, to the idea that sufficient brutality (by Russia) eventually creates its own legitimacy. And that brutality is currently blatantly obvious.
This matters because Putin’s war has always contained a political theory larger than Ukraine. Brutality runs alongside that theory. For Putin, the question is not merely who governs Donetsk or Crimea. It is whether Russia possesses, or really that Russia must possess, a privileged sphere in which the sovereignty of smaller neighbouring states is conditional. It has been part of Russian imperialism, including what was really imperialism by the USSR.
The astuteness of Merz is that he has repeatedly interpreted Russian ambitions in precisely those wider terms. His historical comparisons, including with the 1930s, which are inevitably controversial, are intended to make a more specific point. In 1938, Hitler presented the Sudetenland as a limited territorial demand, yet its acquisition was followed by the destruction of the rest of Czechoslovakia and then further German expansion. Merz invokes that history not to argue that Putin is Hitler or that Russia today is Nazi Germany, but to warn against assuming that Russia’s territorial revisionism in Ukraine will necessarily end once a particular piece of Ukrainian territory is conceded. The question, in his view, is whether rewarding the forcible alteration of one border (the parts of Ukraine that Russia currently holds) reduces Russian ambitions or demonstrates that further pressure can succeed, so Russia then seeks to move onward.
The point is that this kind of territorial revisionism is not likely to be reassuring for Europe. The strategic question is not only what territory Russia wants today, but what precedent is created if military force succeeds in changing recognised borders. And what flows from that. Merz’s argument is that a concession made to secure temporary calm may simply alter Moscow’s calculation about what further pressure can achieve. In that sense, Merz’s historical analogy is less about claiming that the situations are identical than about warning against treating each territorial demand as though it were necessarily the last.
What is now important is that Merz is testing that conviction under conditions much less comfortable than those in which Western leaders have normally made declarations of principle. The September 2026 election in Saxony-Anhalt produced an extraordinary result: the AfD won nearly 44 percent of the vote in that state while Merz’s CDU suffered a crushing defeat. The AfD has called for an end to German support for Ukraine and closer relations with Moscow. Yet Merz responded by insisting that he would not move “a single millimetre” from his conviction that German freedom must also be defended against Russia. It was a Churchill like stance.
This is what Moscow finds most troubling. Putin’s strategy depends not merely on defeating Ukraine militarily, but on persuading Europeans that supporting Ukraine has become politically unbearable. Merz is demonstrating that electoral punishment does not necessarily purchase strategic surrender. If that principle survives bad polls and lost elections, then Moscow’s most valuable weapon, i.e. Western exhaustion, begins to lose some of its force.
Where it gets complex is that Western support for Ukraine has depended on more than weapons inventories. The tricky bit is that it depends on Russian calculation about time — a bit of an unknown. If Putin believes that another winter, another election, another budget fight, another populist surge will fracture European support, continuing the war remains ‘rational’ (for him) even at enormous cost to Russia. But if electoral setbacks do not automatically translate into German and European strategic retreat, the calculation changes. There must be a bit of panic in Russia currently about the calculation given Putin’s and Lavrov’s splurge of comments against Europe and about its ineptness. It is also important to understand the purpose of Europe supporting Ukraine is not only to improve Ukraine’s position on the battlefield. It is also to persuade Moscow that waiting for Europe to collapse into fatigue will not produce a better deal. Europe is also using time.
Germany’s material contribution to Ukraine continues to give Merz’s message weight. By August 2026, the German government put its bilateral civilian assistance to Ukraine since February 2022 at more than €43.3 billion, with approximately €57.6 billion in military assistance delivered or committed for coming years. Air defence has become especially important. Germany is providing additional Patriot interceptors as Ukraine prepares for renewed Russian attacks on energy and civilian infrastructure, while German support increasingly extends to drones, missiles and joint defence production. This assertion by Germany, troubles Putin.
However, it is not so easy for Germany either. It means Merz has to answer one of the hardest political questions surrounding any eventual peace: what exactly is Ukraine fighting toward? It at least involves some association with the European Union, and possibly with NATO.
Here Merz’s proposal for a Ukraine “associate” membership of the European Union is revealing. Ukraine would participate in European institutions and high-level meetings without initially possessing full voting rights, while gaining a political security commitment as it moves toward eventual membership. The idea is imperfect and would inevitably encounter legal and political complications. But its strategic logic is clear. A Ukrainian government may someday have to ask its citizens to accept a deeply unsatisfactory peace. It will be far easier to do so if the settlement points unmistakably westward, that is toward European institutions, economic integration and security guarantees, rather than leaving Ukraine suspended once again between Russia and Europe.
This is also what makes Merz troublesome for Moscow, more troublesome than the familiar caricature of a European hawk. He is not simply advocating toughness for its own sake; he is challenging the assumptions on which Moscow’s strategy toward Europe depends. Hawks can be waited out. What this means is that a hard-line leader may be seen by an opponent as temporary. If Moscow thinks a particular ‘hawk’’ is unusually tough but politically isolated, it can simply endure that leader, wait for elections, public fatigue, coalition changes, or economic pressure, and hope that a more accommodating government eventually replaces them.
However, what matters here is that Germany has actually changed its understanding of the problem, or whether it has changed that understanding. For two decades, German governments pursued a grand experiment in which economic interdependence was expected to moderate Russian power. Trade would produce mutual interest; pipelines would create interdependence; interdependence would create stability. Nord Stream became not merely infrastructure but an assumption cast in steel beneath the Baltic Sea. The experiment failed!
Russia did not become less willing to use force because Europe bought its gas. Instead, Europe discovered that economic (inter)dependence with Russia could itself become an instrument of power for Russia. The lesson of 2022 on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and what happened afterwards regarding trade and sanctions was therefore larger than the collapse of a particular energy policy. Germany learned that commerce cannot substitute indefinitely for deterrence. Merz seems determined not to relearn the lesson in reverse.
This leads to another matter. Instead of believing that trade will pacify Russia, Europe may have to begin believing that territorial concession will satisfy it. Perhaps it would. States do eventually stop wars, and every war must ultimately end in some political arrangement. However, negotiation itself is not appeasement, and no responsible European leader should oppose diplomacy merely to demonstrate toughness. But diplomacy succeeds only when both sides have reason to compromise.
A negotiation conducted because one side (Russia) believes that the democracies opposing it are running out of patience is not necessarily a path to peace. It may simply establish the price of endurance. And if endurance is rewarded, the lesson learned may be to endure longer next time.
That is why Merz matters! His argument is not really that Ukraine must fight forever. It is that Russia must not conclude that fighting longer inevitably improves its position. In strategy, Merz’s position can be enormously powerful, whether grounded in reality or merely adversely affecting Moscow’s perception of supposed Western weakness.
Furthermore, Germany occupies the centre of Europe. Its economic weight is enormous, its military potential is again becoming consequential, and its history makes questions of borders, aggression and accommodation unusually charged. It cannot determine Ukraine’s future by itself. Nor should it. But a Germany that tells Moscow that European patience has limits (and thus negative economic consequences for Russia and adverse military consequences for Moscow in Ukraine) is strategically different from a Germany waiting for an excuse to restore normality. Germany backed by France, can have significant impact on Kremlin minds. It can and appears to have created worry in Kremlin minds.
Putin does not have to fear Friedrich Merz personally. Leaders come and go. What Moscow has more reason to fear is the possibility that Merz represents something more durable: more durable than Merz personally. It is that Moscow ultimately has a bigger problem, in that there is a longer term or lasting change in German strategic thinking, that goes beyond just the view of one Chancellor. It is that Germany may finally have learned that stability cannot simply be wished for or purchased through accommodation; it sometimes has to be protected through deterrence, resilience and a willingness to impose costs on aggression. This is what Germany, France and Europe may ultimately stand for in relation to the conflict brought to Ukraine by Russia.
Wanting stability is not the same as having a policy that actually creates stability. It seems it will have to be a forceful policy. The role Merz is currently playing may well be suited for him and for Germany and Europe. Questions still remain about whether it can be sustained. Similar questions seem to arise with Putin.
However, for years the Kremlin could plausibly wager that eventually Germany would want its old relationship with Russia back. Germany previously placed too much faith in approaches such as economic engagement, energy interdependence, dialogue and accommodation with Russia because these seemed likely to preserve calm. But if those policies did not deter Russian aggression, then they may have produced an appearance of stability without actually securing it. Germany, having learnt that lesson is now forced to adopt a different approach. It may not have wanted to, but aggression by Russia against its neighbours and Putin’s yearning for a Soviet like empire (which has at times been put on display*) means Germany has to. The general perception of Putin being untrustworthy simply adds to the mix.
So, the big problem for Putin is that Merz’s answer is that the old relationship with Russia is precisely what Germany can no longer afford. Moscow is therefore confronting not merely a ‘hostile’’ Chancellor, but the collapse of an assumption on which its German strategy long depended. And once trust has been converted into strategic suspicion, recreating the old relationship becomes far harder. It certainly seems that Russia wants to maintain such a relationship, and that has become a worry for it, and a consequence of its own untrustworthiness. The Kremlin may now be discovering that strategic trust, once squandered, is not easily bought back.
* For example, Putin’s immature emotional lost love for the former USSR.
https://macropsychic.substack.com/p/why-friedrich-merz-is-a-problem-for
