No one in the West, not even the former Chancellor, is to blame for Putin's attack on a peaceful neighboring country.
The Russian President alone is responsible for this unscrupulous decision.
However, the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, at which Merkel claims she did nothing wrong, is part of the unfortunate history.
That meeting, at which Ukraine and Georgia were promised to join the alliance, was indeed marked by a "miscalculation," as Zelenskyy says.
consideration for Russia
At the summit, the American President at the time, Bush, wanted the two former Soviet republics to join quickly.
Germany and France prevented this out of consideration for Russia.
The result was a typical summit compromise.
The two countries received a commitment, but the accession was not completed.
That was the worst of all solutions.
If Ukraine had been included, Putin would probably never have dared to attack;
if accession had never been in prospect, at least this pretext for his attacks, which began in the same year with the invasion of Georgia, would have been lost.
The Bucharest decision created a strategic no man's land in Eastern Europe, from which Putin has been cutting out individual parts for 14 years.
This was no masterpiece of Western diplomacy.