German Chancellor Friedrich Merz holds a press conference in Berlin, 2 September 2025. Photo: EPA/Clemens Bilan

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has described Vladimir Putin as a “war criminal” for the first time in an interview he gave to German TV Channel Sat.1 on Tuesday evening.

Speaking to the channel’s flagship news programme Newstime, Merz said that Putin “might be one of the worst war criminals of our era. That is now plain to see. We must be clear on how to deal with war criminals. There is no room for leniency.”

Accepting that the war was unlikely to be won on the battlefield, Merz said he saw potential in weakening the Russian economy, and voiced his support for the imposition of tariffs on any country that continued to trade with Russia.

The German chancellor once again ruled out sending German troops to Ukraine before a ceasefire came into effect, adding that he was currently “more concerned about the state of Ukraine” now than he was about its future, noting anyway that Putin had no interest in pursuing either a ceasefire or a peace agreement with Ukraine.

Though Merz has previously accused Russia of committing war crimes, he had never before directly called Putin himself a “war criminal”, German weekly Der Spiegel subsequently observed.

Merz, a Christian Democrat who has been chancellor since May, is seen as more hawkish on Russia than his Social Democratic predecessor, Olaf Scholz, and announced an end to the restrictions on the use of long-range weapons being supplied to Kyiv by Berlin and its allies in his first month in office.

Reacting to the German chancellor’s comments, Kremlin press spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that Merz had made “a lot of bad statements” about Putin recently, adding “his opinion can hardly be taken into account”, business daily RBC reported on Wednesday.