Putin calls for return to normal relations with Europe

PanARMENIAN.Net - Russian President Vladimir Putin used a visit on Sunday, May 10, by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to call for a return to normal relations with Europe, brushing aside the widespread boycott by Western leaders of the huge Victory Day parade on Red Square a day earlier, the new York Times reports.

“We do face some problems today, but the sooner we can end their negative impact on our relations, the better it will be,” Putin told Merkel at the start of their talks, after both leaders laid large bouquets of red flowers on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier along the Kremlin wall.

Merkel and other Western leaders avoided the colossal official outpouring marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. Of some 68 leaders invited, only 27 attended, with virtually every Western country represented by its ambassador at the event, the biggest military parade ever staged on Red Square.

Yet Merkel said, according to the NYT, she felt obliged to mark the end of the war against Nazi Germany during which the Soviet Union lost more than 26 million people, far more than any other country. “It is important for me to pay tribute to the fallen soldiers,” Merkel said at a news conference. “We will always tell the Russian nation that we will remember the losses and the atrocities.”

Putin sought to use Merkel’s visit, as well as that of the other world leaders, to underscore that the Ukraine crisis had not left Russia isolated.

“Everyone we wanted to see was here,” he said at one point when asked on television about the boycott.

At the news conference after he and Merkel had met for a couple of hours, he emphasized that about 6,000 German businesses operated in Russia and that they would like to see the “obstacles removed” from trade.

For her part, Merkel made the kind of critical statement about the Ukraine conflict rarely heard in Moscow these days and one that made it clear that Germany, at least, was not quite ready for business as usual. “We have sought more and more cooperation in recent years,” Merkel said about German-Russian relations. “The criminal and illegal annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine have led to a serious setback to this cooperation.”

Both leaders expressed new support for the cease-fire agreement agreed upon in Minsk, Belarus, in February, although both suggested that the implementation was flawed.