Germany’s former Chancellor Angela Merkel has blamed Poland and the Baltic states for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, writes dailymail.co.uk.

“Merkel, who led the country from 2005 to 2021, made the explosive claim in an interview with Hungarian outlet Partizan. She said she blamed Poland and the Baltic states for the severance of diplomatic ties between Russia and the EU, which she said led to the invasion just a few months later.

In her telling of history, Poland’s refusal to support the Minsk Agreements, a pair of key international agreements between Russia and the EU, emboldened Putin to properly invade Ukraine in 2022.

Following the secession of Donetsk and Luhansk, two Ukrainian regions that broke away from the country to become what Russia calls its republics, representatives from the two countries and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) signed the first Minsk agreement in September 2014.

This agreement sought to establish a ceasefire between Russia, Ukraine and the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR).

Merkel claimed that the first Minsk agreement “brought about calm” between 2015 and 2021 and gave Ukraine, which had been defeated by Russia during a summer counter-offensive in 2015 that aimed to take back its land, time to “gather strength” and “become a different country”. The initial agreement didn’t appear to hold any sway with Putin, or his lackeys in Donetsk and Luhansk. By January 2015, just four months after the first Minsk agreement was signed, Russia and the DPR had engaged in a heavy battle with Ukrainian forces despite the Kremlin"s interests being met.

Minsk II was signed the following month, which also did not prevent further fighting. Between 2015 and 2021, Russian forces had killed or wounded more than 5,000 Ukrainian troops in defiance of the ceasefire agreement. But Merkel said that it was only by 2021 that she "felt that Putin was no longer taking the Minsk Agreement seriously.

“That’s why I wanted a new format where we could speak directly with Putin as the European Union. Some people didn’t support this. These were primarily the Baltic states, but Poland was also against it”. She added that these four nations were “afraid” that “we wouldn’t have a common policy towards Russia”.

Merkel dismissively added in the interview, which was translated into German and then English: “In any case, it didn’t come to fruition. Then I left office, and then Putin’s aggression began”.