The German foreign minister says you negotiate with adversaries, not friends, but concedes there was no positive result, so critics want to know what the talks were for. Germany clearly wants a seat at the table where Europe's future is being negotiated, but the botched way it went about getting one last week risks leading to the outcome Europe's eastern edge has feared since 1945. The Yalta conference that year left Poland and other countries in this part of Europe inside Moscow's sphere through one bargain struck over its head. The danger now is a Yalta delivered in instalments, as Europe's larger states each open their own channel to the Kremlin. When Johann Wadephul, Germany's foreign minister, met Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly on September 26, Berlin gained little that sending the Russians a public statement could not have delivered, but it gave away the leverage that comes from Europe speaking to Russia as one. Twenty minutes in a Russian room The meeting was badly handled at almost every stage, and the details show how much of it Berlin conceded to Moscow. The first encounter between German and Russian foreign ministers since the full-scale invasion lasted a little over 20 minutes, in a room provided by the Russian delegation. Germany demanded no pre-conditions for the meeting such as Russia stopping strikes against civilian targets in Ukraine. According to Russia's deputy foreign minister, Dmitry Lyubinsky, it was arranged “literally at the last minute” at Germany's request. German reporting suggests Moscow first signalled its readiness through third countries, but Berlin left the Russians free to tell the story their way, and they did. Lavrov told a press conference that he had heard nothing from Wadephul that Berlin had not already said in public, adding that he had told him: “You could just have called me and said: 'read my statement'”. He then used his speech to the Assembly to take aim at Germany. Berlin's European partners, meanwhile, were informed only afterwards. The overall effect was that Germany looked like the weaker party seeking an audience with Lavrov. Of course, Wadephul presented things rather differently. Speaking on German regional broadcaster ARD, he read Lavrov's dismissive response as a sign of weakness, saying that this is how someone reacts "who has no arguments". He wanted, he said, to send a signal that such questions in Europe cannot be left permanently to Americans, because Germany has its own interests and perspectives "and only we can raise them". The problem with Wadephul's meeting is that once Moscow knows what you want, it can put a price on it. Berlin has now said publicly that it wants a seat at the table, which turns that seat into something the Kremlin can offer or withhold. In practice, that means access with conditions attached: Moscow could make further contact depending on Germany going softer on the next sanctions package, on the use of frozen Russian assets, or on weapons deliveries to Ukraine. It has form here. When Olaf Scholz called Putin in November 2024, the Russian president used the conversation to offer “mutually beneficial cooperation”, including on energy, if Berlin was willing. What makes this dangerous is the way the EU takes decisions. Sanctions require the agreement of all 27 member states, so Moscow's aim is to find a single government that values its channel to the Kremlin enough to hesitate. Some of the sharpest criticism came from Wadephul's own party. Roderich Kiesewetter, a Christian Democrat foreign and defence policy specialist, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the meeting had achieved "nothing except false hopes and confusion". For the countries lying between Germany and Russia, he said, it revived the “old nightmare” of Berlin and Moscow talking over their heads - and over Ukraine's. The table being laid That table is being laid by the Americans. Donald Trump's envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner spent more than three hours with Vladimir Putin on 5 September, the CIA director has been to Moscow, and Putin has been invited to the G20 summit in Miami in December. The striking thing is how closely American policy now echoes Russia's own phrases. The US National Security Strategy of December 2025 commits America to "reestablish strategic stability with Russia", treats Moscow as Europe's problem to manage rather than America's adversary, and says NATO should not be a "perpetually expanding alliance". Witkoff's 28-point peace plan of November 2025, drafted with a Kremlin envoy, would have left Ukraine neutral, its army capped and NATO membership ruled out, and in New York last week Lavrov called for a new Eurasian security architecture that would effectively grant Russia its coveted sphere of influence. None of this amounts to a deal, and the same National Security Strategy says Washington wants to prevent any adversary from dominating Europe. Even so, Moscow's demands, Washington's vocabulary and the shape of the peace plan make a sphere-of-influence outcome thinkable in a way it was not five years ago. Yalta by instalments What we are watching is an old habit. For two decades, Berlin and Paris have repeatedly talked to Moscow over the heads of the countries that live closest to Russia. In the 2000s, German and French leaders held regular three-way summits with the Kremlin, and in 2010 Angela Merkel agreed a memorandum with Dmitry Medvedev proposing a new EU-Russia security committee, to the dismay of the EU's former Soviet-bloc members. The clearest case came in 2014. That February, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski sat alongside his German and French counterparts in Kyiv, mediating between Viktor Yanukovych and the Maidan protesters. By June, when Germany and France set up the Normandy format with Russia and Ukraine to negotiate over the war in the east of Ukraine, Poland had been dropped, reportedly because Moscow did not want it there and Paris and Berlin were unwilling to risk the talks for Warsaw's sake. The Minsk agreements that came out of those talks are now treated in Brussels as a model to avoid. The danger for Poland comes from moments like these, with no grand bargain required. The habit tends to follow an American move. In June 2021, a week after Joe Biden met Putin in Geneva, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron sprang a proposal for an EU summit with Putin and their partners. Poland and the Baltic states blocked it, and Kaja Kallas, then Estonia's prime minister and now the EU's foreign policy chief, asked what had changed in Russia's behaviour to earn it. Days after Trump's election in 2024, Olaf Scholz telephoned Putin, arguing that the leader of a major European country should not stay silent while the American and Russian presidents talked. Donald Tusk, Poland's prime minister, replied that nobody would “stop Putin with phone calls”. Each time, the Kremlin made sure the record showed who had come asking, as it did after Scholz's call and again after Macron's in July 2025. No single contact settles anything, and I doubt anyone in Berlin or Paris wants a Russian sphere in Central Europe. Even so, the contacts accumulate, and they teach Moscow that Europe's big capitals will come to it one at a time, which is how spheres of influence take shape without anyone signing one.
