She was hailed as the world’s most powerful woman, the de facto leader of Europe and, for a while, of the free world. For 16 years Angela Merkel’s popularity in her native Germany never fell below 50 per cent. For those who put their faith in the EU, she could do no wrong.

Then, when Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, her reputation collapsed. Now her legacy lies in ruins. It is rather difficult to find a Western politician whose status has fallen off a cliff quite like Merkel’s. Ukrainians blame her for appeasing Putin and leaving them at his mercy. They recall the 2008 Bucharest summit, when George W. Bush wanted to offer Ukraine Nato membership but the Germans and French vetoed it.

As the full horror of the Russian occupation emerged, Volodymyr Zelensky could not contain his wrath: “I invite Mrs Merkel and Mr Sarkozy to visit Bucha, to see what the policy of 14 years of concessions has led to. The Ukrainian president called on her and the former French president “to see with their own eyes the tortured Ukrainian men and women”.

Even now, Angela Merkel apparently has no regrets. Her office issued a terse statement: “Former German Chancellor Dr Angela Merkel stands by her decisions in connection with the 2008 Nato summit in Bucharest.” She refuses to apologise, then, for any of the policies that have led Germany and Europe to catastrophe. Instead, Mrs Merkel is writing her memoirs, convinced that history will somehow vindicate her. 

Once it was fashionable to compare her with Margaret Thatcher. Yet her approach was the opposite of the Iron Lady’s. Where Mrs Thatcher stood up to tyrants, Mrs Merkel sought to accommodate them, in the naive belief that prosperity would rid Russia and China of their authoritarian regimes. Germans used to call her Mutti (“Mummy”). Not any more. Mrs Merkel is the kind of mother who, when her child is bullied and beaten up at school, refuses to confront the teachers and instead blames the victim.

Her admirers used to boast that she enjoyed a uniquely honest relationship with Putin, because she could talk frankly to the Russian dictator in his own language. Yet the truth is that Mrs Merkel, the former East German, feared the former KGB thug – and he smelled her fear. In later years, they spoke only in German, enabling Putin to hold the whip hand.

From the outset, there was something sadomasochistic about their relationship. When she was his guest in 2007, Putin brought his pet labrador Connie to one of their meetings, knowing that she was nervous of dogs. Yet she played along with his blatant misogyny and fell into all the geopolitical traps he had laid for her.

The biggest of these traps was her decision to allow Germany to become ever more dependent on Russian energy. By the time she left office last year, Germany was importing 55 per cent of its gas, 34 per cent of its oil and 52 per cent of its coal from Russia. Her short-termist, opportunistic exit from nuclear power compounded this. 

Worst of all was Mrs Merkel’s stubborn support for the deeply sinister Nordstream gas pipeline project, which flew in the face of Anglo-American warnings and desperate pleas from Ukraine. She turned a blind eye to the fact that Nordstream’s chairman – her predecessor as Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder – was being bankrolled by Russian energy. Nordstream had all the hallmarks of political interference, but she insisted that it was purely commercial.

Mrs Merkel is no less culpable for her failure to maintain German defences. On her watch, in the words of the Bundeswehr’s most senior general, they were “stripped bare”. She allowed German firms to sell “dual use” military equipment to Russia, but banned arms exports to Ukraine.

After Putin annexed Crimea and sent his “little green men” into Ukraine’s Donbas region, the writing was on the wall. Yet Mrs Merkel persisted in “building bridges” to Russia right up to the day she left office last December. Her most senior colleagues, such as the former finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble and the former foreign minister, now President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, have admitted that it was a fatal mistake to trust the Russian president. “Today I know — I was wrong,” Schäuble says. “We were all wrong.”

Not Mrs Merkel, though. She, the chief architect of the European policies that gave Putin the green light to inflict war crimes on Ukraine, has yet to show any hint of contrition. It is high time that Angela Merkel said sorry to Ukraine, Europe and the free world. She owes us all an apology.