Germany’s likely next chancellor Friedrich Merz said Monday he thought US President Donald Trump had deliberately escalated last week’s angry clash with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky which shocked Kyiv’s allies.
In their Oval Office meeting on Friday, Trump berated Zelensky, telling him to be more “thankful” for US support against the invading Russian army in the three-year-old war and demanding he “make a deal” with Moscow.
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“According to my assessment this was not a spontaneous reaction to what Zelensky was saying but clearly a deliberate escalation,” Merz told reporters at a press conference about the White House meeting that also included US Vice President JD Vance.
Merz’s center-right CDU/CSU alliance came first in last month’s election and is currently in talks with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) with a view to forming a government.
Merz said he was “rather astonished at the tone of the conversation” at Friday’s White House meeting, adding that it was “unhelpful.”
Pointing to Vance’s speech at last month’s Munich Security Conference, Merz said that there was a “certain continuity in the things we currently see from Washington.”
Just days before Germany’s election, Vance had demanded that Europe “step up” in managing its own security and lambasted European countries on a range of culture war issues.
Despite being a long-standing transatlanticist, Merz has emphasized the need for more European independence from the United States in defense policy in light of the Trump administration’s actions.
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“I think we need to prepare to do much, much more for our own security in the coming years and decades,” he said, although he insisted “that we must do everything we can to keep the Americans in Europe.”
Merz has been a staunch supporter of Ukraine and has in the past said he would be prepared to send long-range Taurus missiles to Kyiv which could reach deep into Russian territory.
Outgoing SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz has refused to do this, citing the danger of direct confrontation with Russia.
Scholz’s government has however been Ukraine’s second-biggest supplier of aid since Russia’s full-scale invasion began three years ago and Germany has played host to more than a million Ukrainian refugees.
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