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 when he warned against escalating the language used in the Western conflict with Russia. On a visit to Moscow he was invited to meet Mr Putin (who had left the G20 summit early). The result was a storm inside Germany itself.

Was Mr Steinmeier splitting away from his chancellor? “Absolute nonsense,” said his spokeswoman. Mrs Merkel and Mr Steinmeier have studied the failures of diplomacy that led to the first world war 100 years ago. Both want to keep communicating with Russia, but they also want to stand up for principles.

Yet they hail from different parties and traditions. Mrs Merkel leads the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU). Mr Steinmeier belongs to the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD). The two parties are now in a “grand coalition”. But the CDU has, since its first post-war chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, sided firmly with the West. The SPD has, ever since its first chancellor in 1969, Willy Brandt, instead pursued Ostpolitik (Eastern policy), which focused more on rapprochement with the east, and especially with Russia.

Now the two parties are instinctively taking up their old positions. On the SPD side, two former chancellors, Helmut Schmidt and Gerhard Schröder, have expressed surprising sympathy for Mr Putin. Matthias Platzeck, a former leader of the SPD and state premier who now runs the German-Russian forum, a conference grouping, suggested that Russia’s “annexation of Crimea be retroactively recognised by international law, so that it be acceptable for all.” He has back-pedalled, but only partially. This prompted Horst Seehofer, the premier of Bavaria and leader of the CSU, the CDU’s sister party in the state, to warn that it would be “flammably dangerous” if Mr Steinmeier’s diplomacy conflicted with Mrs Merkel’s.

Mr Putin, who was a KGB officer in Dresden when the Berlin Wall fell, is aware of Germany’s internal fissures and seeks to exploit them. This month RT, a state-run television channel formerly called Russia Today, launched an online German version; it will add a German television channel next year. An editor at its video agency, Ruptly, has been talking up Russia on German talk shows. So did Mr Putin, in an interview for German television watched by 6m viewers. But his strategy may backfire: Russia’s blatant propaganda may drive some to back Mrs Merkel’s tougher line.