Putin wags a finger at Mutti OVER the past year, Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, has become the West’s diplomatic shield against Russia’s Vladimir Putin. That is partly because America’s Barack Obama is distracted and weakened by his midterm elections. It is also because nobody else in the European Union has the same clout with Russia as Germany’s cool, self-controlled chancellor. So it matters when Mrs Merkel loses her temper. After some 40 conversations with Mr Putin over the Ukraine crisis, and a particularly frustrating four hours of talks at the recent G20 summit in Brisbane, Mrs Merkel was at last ready to call things by their proper name.Mr Putin “tramples with his feet on international law”, she told an Australian think-tank. His thinking on spheres of influence seems atavistic. Will Mr Putin next claim Moldova? The Balkans? His actions and his deceitful methods violate European values. She worries about a “wider conflagration” (the German term literally means “spreading fire”). It was the first time she had spoken so clearly, so publicly.But Mrs Merkel’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, appeared to contradict her…
