Germany’s next Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Monday that he thought that US President Donald Trump had deliberately degenerated the angry conflict from last week with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which shocked kyiv’s allies.
On Friday, during their oval office meeting, Trump reprimanded Zelensky, telling him to be more “grateful” for American support against the invasive Russian army in the three -year war and demanding that he “conclude” Moscow.
“According to my evaluation, it was not a spontaneous reaction to what Zelensky said, but clearly a deliberate escalation,” Merz told journalists at a press conference on the meeting of the White House which also included the US vice-president JD Vance.
The CDU / CSU central alliance to the right of Merz arrived first in the elections of last month and is currently in talks with the Social Democrats of Center-Gauche (SPD) in order to form a government.
Merz said that he was “rather surprised in the tone of the conversation” at the meeting of the Blanche on Friday, adding that it was “useless”.
Presenting Vance’s speech at the Munich security conference last month, Merz said there was a “certain continuity in the things we currently see from Washington”.
A few days before the German elections, Vance had demanded that Europe “intensify” the management of its own security and castigates European countries on a range of cultural war problems.
Despite being a long-standing transatlantism, Merz underlined the need for European independence from the United States in defense policy in the light of the Trump administration actions.
“I think we have to prepare to do a lot, much more for our own security in the years and decades to come,” he said, although he insisted that we must do our best to keep the Americans in Europe “.
Merz was a fervent supporter of Ukraine and said in the past that he would be ready to send long -range bullfights to Kyiv, which could deeply reach Russian territory.
Chancellor SPD outgoing Olaf Scholz refused to do so, citing the danger of direct confrontation with Russia.
The Scholz government, however, was the second largest help supplier in Ukraine since the large -scale invasion of Russia began three years ago and Germany welcomed more than a million Ukrainian refugees.
