PUTIN CAN CHILL GERMANY QUITE A BIT HIMSELF:

Merkel's Middle Way: Chancellor Charting New Role for Germany (Jim Hoagland, January 19, 2006, Washington Post)

Angela Merkel chilled Vladimir Putin's Kremlin this week only a few days after she thawed the Bush White House. The back-to-back visits were an accident of scheduling. But they signal the determination of the new German chancellor to put her own stamp on the foreign policy of Europe's strongest country.

She hopes to end three years of strained if not hostile relations between Washington and Berlin, as well as the lavish displays of camaraderie and complicity that united German and Russian leaders. Merkel is out to rebalance these key relationships -- but from a new vantage point. [...]

Merkel's habit of explaining big points through her own life story -- a 51-year-old former East German physicist, she grew up in a communist dictatorship and came to politics only after Germany's reunification in 1990 -- also seemed likely to bond her more closely to Bush than to Putin, who served as a KGB officer in East Germany.

"She can talk to any Russian she wants to, in fluent Russian. Putin monopolized Schroeder with his KGB-taught, fluent German," one U.S. official observed approvingly. In Moscow this week, Merkel met with citizens critical of Putin's rule and pressed the Russian leader on the war in Chechnya.

But Merkel is not nostalgic for the Cold War or for an American protectorate over Germany, which it created. She recognizes that Germany, which imports more than one-third of its energy from Russia, has to maintain a good working relationship with Putin's country.