German chancellor Angela Merkel has a lot on her plate. In addition to keeping her rabble-rouser junior coalition partners in the tent, constantly looking over her shoulder for the increasingly renegade Horst Seehofer, and trying to come up with a European solution to the headache that is illegal migration, Merkel will be sitting down with Russian president Vladimir Putin this weekend to talk state business at the Meseberg.
Merkel and Putin have a lot to discuss. The war in Ukraine’s Donbas region continues at a steady clip, notwithstanding the short-term ceasefires that usually collapse after a few hours or (if one is lucky) days. Bashar al-Assad, Moscow’s man in Damascus, is currently planning for another indiscriminate, scorched-earth military campaign in Idlib, an operation that could push millions of Syrians towards Turkey’s southern border. The Nord Stream II pipeline, an energy transit project Donald Trump hates about as much as Omarosa, will be on the docket.
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