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After one of her first encounters with Vladimir Putin in 2002, Angela Merkel joked to aides
that she had passed the "KGB test" by staring straight into his eyes without averting her
gaze. Unlike presidents in Washington - George W.
Bush claimed to have gotten a glimpse of Putin's soul and Barack Obama promised to "reset"
relations with Russia - the German chancellor has never harbored any illusions about the
former Soviet agent, nor hopes that she might change him.
It is this hard-nosed realism, born of Merkel's own experience growing up in a Soviet garrison
town in East Germany and reinforced over a turbulent 14-year relationship with Putin,
that has earned her respect in the Kremlin and thrust her into the potentially risky
role of chief mediator in the Ukraine crisis. When Merkel and Putin interact it is a clash
of polar opposite world views, aides to the chancellor say.
For Merkel, the physicist, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a godsend that launched
her extraordinary career as a politician. For Putin, who was living in the East German
city of Dresden at the time, it was a calamity that led within two short years to the collapse
of the Soviet Union - an event the Russian leader has described as the biggest geopolitical
catastrophe of the 20th century. But despite different outlooks, Merkel and
Putin, born less than two years apart, speak each other's language - literally and figuratively.
Merkel, a fan of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, won a trip to Moscow as a teenager for her
mastery of the Russian language. Putin's favorite subject in school was German,
which he perfected during his half decade as a KGB officer in Dresden, later sending
his daughters to the German school in Moscow. On Merkel's first trip to Moscow as chancellor,
the two leaders conversed in their native tongues with translators present, but found
themselves interjecting repeatedly to correct the interpreters. Aides say their conversations
follow the same pattern to this day. "They have been working together for over
a decade," said Alexander Rahr, head of the German-Russian forum in Berlin. "It hasn't
always been smooth, but Putin knows Merkel better and respects her more than the other
leaders. He's never had a good relationship with Obama."