German MP Stegner on the meeting between Chancellor Scholz and President Putin: it is important to have a dialogue
Photo: Alexey Vitvitsky / RIA Novosti
Member of the Bundestag Committee on Foreign Policy from the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and ex-deputy chairman of the party Ralf Stegner commented on the information about a possible meeting of the new German Chancellor Olaf Scholz with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He assessed the need for negotiations in an interview with Izvestia.
According to him, Germany has always paid special attention to negotiations with the Russian Federation, and will maintain a dialogue in any format.
“Of course, such meetings are reported when they are agreed, and not done through interviews. I would like to answer this question differently. We believe it is important to conduct regular negotiations in this format. This position is in the interests of our allies. However, Germany has always paid special attention to the dialogue with the Russian Federation, not only for historical reasons, but also for geographical ones. If we maintain a dialogue with the largest country in Europe on all possible platforms, be it the Normandy format, the Russia-NATO Council or the OSCE meeting, it will be useful in any case,” Stegner said.
On January 3, Bild wrote that the new Chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, hopes to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the near future. According to the sources of the newspaper, the head of the German government wanted to take the building of relations with Moscow under his personal control.
At the end of December 2021, Putin had a telephone conversation with Scholz. During the conversation, he informed the German chancellor about the Russian side's proposals for security guarantees that rule out further NATO advance to the east and the deployment of strike weapons systems in countries bordering Russia.
