Merkel in Russia

What should have been a (relatively) relaxing summer holiday meeting between Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the beautiful Black Sea resort of Sochi on Friday, will now turn into Merkel’s most difficult foreign visit since she took office in 2005.

The original agenda included accelerating the negotiations on the new EU-Russia partnership agreement, an update on the Russian-German Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic (Merkel’s initial scepticism having seemed to vanish in June) and a visit to the prospective Olympic sites in Sochi for the 2014 Winter games.

Following the five-day war between Russia and Georgia and the strong reactions it prompted from various EU members and the United States, Merkel will now have strike an extremely difficult balance so as to not offend any side, or even risk a renewed escalation of the conflict.

Unlike the United States, which has used extremely harsh-anti-Russian rhetoric, the EU depends on Russia for its energy needs and cannot afford a serious deterioration of relations with Moscow. Although Germany and France were instrumental in preventing Georgia’s NATO membership at the Bucharest summit in April, Europe has always supported Georgia’s Western orientation and was quick to despatch mediators to Tbilisi.

Following the agreement by Moscow and Tbilisi to the EU ceasefire proposal, and the conclusions of the emergency EU foreign ministers’ meeting on August 13 (which includes provisions for an EU ground presence in Georgia), Merkel will have to explain the EU’s position to Medvedev. She will have to convince him that any potential EU observer mission (to which most former communist EU members have already pledged staff) will not be an anti-Russian force to support Georgia. Merkel will be able to point to the fact the EU did not condemn anyone for the conflict, and that the EU has not suspended the negotiations on the new EU-Russia treaty as demanded by of its Eastern members.

To Georgia (especially after the strong rhetorical support it enjoyed from Washington) and to the Eastern EU member states, Merkel will have to demonstrate that the EU continues to support Tbilisi’s Western path. To this end, she will now also travel to Georgia.

In Germany itself, Merkel will have to convince businesses (a core constituency for her conservative party) which are extremely concerned over the imminent economic downturn, that she will not jeopardise good German-Russian economic relations, over what to them seem to be irrelevant moral and ethical questions.

Merkel’s challenge is formidable. However, given her reputation as an honest broker, her past and consistent public criticism of Russia’s human rights record (not least because of her upbringing in former communist East Germany) and her pragmatic nature, she is probably the European politician best placed to tackle the challenge.