GENEVA, December 1. /TASS/. Since the early 2000s, Germany has missed out on excellent economic deals with Russia while trying to draw Ukraine into NATO, German economist and former president of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich, Professor Hans-Werner Sinn believes.

According to him, the two countries enjoyed a "very mutually beneficial symbiosis" that "existed for decades, even during the Soviet era."

The expert noted that after the collapse of the USSR, amid a severe economic crisis, Russia's position was quite vulnerable, making it the perfect time to reach agreements with it.

"What excellent deals we could have made, speaking in terms of [US President Donald] Trump, and achieved stable peace solutions during this time," he said in an interview with the Swiss magazine Die Weltwoche.

"Instead, we committed this stupidity by trying to drag Ukraine into NATO," he regrated.

Sinn believes that "it would have been much better to have avoided all of this" by accepting Russian President Vladimir Putin's extended hand in 2001 to establish cooperation. The expert recalled that the proposal was to create a free trade zone between Western and Eastern Europe, including Russia.

In his opinion, none of this happened because "the Americans didn't want it."

In particular, the economist cites the doctrine presented in 1992 by then-Deputy Secretary of the Pentagon Paul Wolfowitz. According to it, the greatest danger to the United States in the world since the collapse of the USSR is cooperation between Russia and Germany.

"Therefore, it was apparently in the interests of the United States to risk the turmoil associated with Ukraine's admission to NATO," the expert concludes, noting that for Germany, "this was a mistake.".