Angela Merkel (CDU) began her presumably last visit as Federal Chancellor in Moscow by laying a wreath at the grave of the unknown soldier in the Alexander Garden by the Kremlin wall.

This is how Merkel picked up on 2015.

At that time, on the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, she laid a memorial wreath in the same place.

It hadn't come then on May 9th, Victory Day. 

Friedrich Schmidt

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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President Vladimir Putin had invited Merkel to the big military parade in Moscow, but the Chancellor did not want to follow suit in view of the Russian annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine and instead suggested visiting the next day.

“It is a touching moment, a picture of unity in the face of the horror of the past,” wrote the FAZ at the time about the wreath-laying ceremony.

So it was symbolic that Merkel's farewell visit began with a wreath-laying ceremony, despite all the differences in current politics.

Such gestures count in Moscow - and also that Merkel will only travel to Kiev after Putin said goodbye, where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Selenskyj will be expecting her on Sunday. 

Not just a farewell visit

After laying the wreath, before the talks began, Putin told Merkel in the Kremlin that Germany would remain “one of our most important partners, in Europe, in the world and overall, partly because of your efforts as Chancellor over the past 16 years”. You are "constantly in contact by telephone", the visit will not only be a farewell visit, but "full of serious business content". Merkel said she wanted to talk to Putin about the situation in Afghanistan, Libya, bilateral relations and the state of civil society in Russia. A press conference was announced for the afternoon.

Merkel last visited Putin in January of last year. At that time, the Chancellor was particularly interested in her upcoming Berlin talks on Libya, a country with a civil war, where Russian mercenaries are fighting for the warlord Khalifa Haftar against the United Nations-appointed “Government of the National Agreement”.

Merkel's lips didn't say a word of criticism on that snowy January day, and she didn't even mention the murder of the Georgian Selimchan Changoshvili in August 2019 in the Berlin zoo. The verdict on the case in which a Russian is still standing in court in Berlin, whom the Federal Prosecutor sees as the stooge of the Russian state, is still pending. Instead, it was once again about the prime example of German-Russian coexistence even in difficult times, Nord Stream 2.