Netflix in with a late bid
Makes sense with the 10 second lead in to the next chapter. Will be glued to it.
1 Like
Liz Truss should stay there.
How long will Ukraine hold out for? A week?
Be over in 2 days I reckon
After that Hockey match earlier I’d be fearful if I was Czech once Ukraine has been dealt with
UKRAINE CRISIS
Putin’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline: the Stasi connection
Matthew Campbell reports on how an ex-spy and a former German chancellor teamed up with the Kremlin to build the £8bn supply line that is tearing the West’s leaders apart
Putin and Gerhard Schröder, right, greet each other on the former German leader’s 70th birthday in St Petersburg
ANATOLY MALTSEV/EPA/REX
Saturday February 12 2022, 6.00pm GMT, The Sunday Times
Somewhere in the bowels of the Kremlin is a labyrinthine wine cellar in which Vladimir Putin entertains his special guests. A visitor recalled his surprise at seeing the former German leader Gerhard Schröder there once, clutching a glass of red.
Schröder’s ties to the oenophile Russian president are well documented, though: to the horror of many of his countrymen he held his 70th birthday party in St Petersburg in 2014, only a few weeks after Russia annexed Crimea. Putin, the guest of honour, was seen giving him a bear hug while another, less well-known, German looked on with a smile: Matthias Warnig, then the managing director of the Nord Stream gas pipeline project.
The corpulent, silver-haired Warnig is a former spy in East Germany’s Stasi secret police, whose easy charm and habit of secrecy endeared him to Putin when they met decades ago and who has ended up becoming, along with Schröder, one of the most powerful players in the Russian leader’s global political games.
Between them the three men have used a pair of lucrative gas pipelines to drive a wedge through the West.
The resulting rift was on awkward display last week when President Biden promised to put an end to the latest gas link if Putin invaded Ukraine but the new German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, could not even bring himself to utter the pipeline’s name — Nord Stream 2 — let alone publicly agree on shutting it down.
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Will Biden’s threat of turning Putin’s pet project into an industrial relic now be enough to deter him from whatever he is planning in Ukraine? Having already run rings around four American presidents, Putin shows no immediate signs of being cowed by a fifth.
One of Schröder’s last acts as chancellor in 2005 was to approve the Nord Stream project, allowing Russia to lay pipelines under the Baltic Sea and pump gas straight into Germany. Schröder was then appointed to the board of Rosneft, Russia’s top oil producer, as well as head of the shareholders’ committee of Nord Stream, a company set up by the Gazprom state energy giant.
Last week he was promoted again, this time to the board of Gazprom, days after accusing Ukraine of “sabre-rattling” even as Russia massed what looked like an invasion force of more than 100,000 troops close to its border.
There can be no greater symbol of our addiction to Russian money and gas — whatever the geopolitical cost — than the two Nord Stream pipelines.
Built with European support and financing, they have immeasurably strengthened a Russian leader accused of murdering his enemies, undermining foreign elections, shooting down a civilian airliner and running a kleptocratic regime apparently intent on reviving the former Soviet Union.
Recently completed — but not yet open — Nord Stream 2 stretches 764 miles under the Baltic Sea from a terminal near St Petersburg to the German coast. It is expected to double the capacity of the earlier pipeline so that together they provide 110 billion cubic metres of gas a year.
Until the first Nord Stream pipeline opened in 2012, Russian gas flowed into Europe through the leaky “Brotherhood” pipeline going through Ukraine and the Yamal-Europe pipe through Belarus and Poland. The Nord Stream lines bypass these countries, depriving them of billions of dollars in transit fees. Ukraine has pointed to Russian gas standoffs in 2006 and 2009 and recent threats to Moldova to argue that Russia will not hesitate to turn off Europe’s gas in pursuit of some political advantage.
Poland’s former foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski has compared the pipelines to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union to dismember Poland.
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Kremlin assurances that Nord Stream is a purely commercial enterprise have left western analysts deeply sceptical. “None of this is commercial,” said Kristine Berzina, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
For her and other experts the world’s longest undersea pipeline is not only an extraordinary feat of engineering but the result of a giant Russian influence operation in Berlin, spearheaded by Schroeder and Warnig, now the chief executive of Nord Stream 2.
It has been a target for US sanctions and a bone of contention for years between successive governments in Germany and America, where fears have grown that Nord Stream 2 will make Europe’s largest economy, the world’s largest natural gas importer, excessively reliant on Russian energy.
In 2018 President Trump told Angela Merkel, who took over as German chancellor from Schroeder in 2005: “Angela, you got to stop buying gas from Putin.”
The Nord Stream 2 pipeline being laid in the Baltic Sea in 2018
BERND WUESTNECK/DPA/AP
US officials regarded the new pipeline as “incompatible” with the military shield America maintains over Europe. Their thinking, according to one, was: “If you want us to protect you from the beast, why are you feeding it?”
Instead, Trump wanted Merkel to buy more expensive American liquid gas — “freedom gas”, his government called it. This left Germans wondering whether America was motivated by fears of strengthening Russia’s hand or commercial profit.
In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown in 2011, Merkel began accelerating Germany’s phasing-out of nuclear power. Yet her continuing support of the pipeline project seemed perplexing for a figure whose formative experience was growing up in East Germany under Warnig’s sinister former employers, the Stasi.
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Her mistrust of Putin was cemented by an incident in 2007 when he let his pet labrador off the leash in a meeting with Merkel in Sochi, knowing she had been terrified of dogs since being attacked by one as a young woman.
She argued that Nord Stream would improve the continent’s energy security and that Gazprom already operates gas links to Europe crossing Ukraine. “A Russian gas molecule remains a Russian gas molecule irrespective of whether it comes from Ukraine of from underneath the Baltic Sea,” Merkel, a former physicist, told the Munich security conference in 2019.
● Read more: Liz Truss accuses Putin of Ukraine ‘puppet’ plan
What baffles many onlookers is why Germany remains so attached to a project that critics say will allow the Kremlin leader to put his boot on Europe’s windpipe whenever he wants.
The long history of Berlin’s eastern gas links began during the Cold War, when the first Russian gas started to trickle down a pipeline into Germany in 1973 under the former chancellor Willy Brandt’s “Ostpolitik”, or “eastern policy”. His idea was to encourage reform of the Soviet Union by trading with it and buying its gas.
That policy was seen to have succeeded with the collapse of the Soviet empire and reunification of Germany. Today, though, the same German arguments about encouraging liberal democracy in Putin’s Russia have begun to ring hollow.
No matter how much Schroeder’s heirs in the Social Democratic Party (SPD), including Scholz, might prefer to look the other way, Putin has turned darkly authoritarian after two decades in power.
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He has changed the constitution to allow him to rule until 2036 and locked up Alexei Navalny, his chief critic, who narrowly escaped death in a nerve agent poisoning allegedly carried out by state security agents.
Vladimir Putin, left, and a man believed to be Matthias Warnig at a 1980s meeting of KGB and Stasi officers in Dresden
BSTU
Instead of helping to flush out Russian criminality, analysts argue, the West has been corrupted by its embrace of Russian wealth, heedless of the criminal and KGB forces behind it. Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, has described this process as “Russia reversing our plumbing”.
The Nord Stream pipeline is a prime example. Its origins are in freewheeling, 1990s St Petersburg, when Putin was about to begin his meteoric climb to the Kremlin. He was deputy mayor of the former imperial city and responsible for its external relations: each company that wanted to establish a presence there had to get the necessary licence from him.
One day Warnig came to see him. The young German had been sent by the Dresdner Bank to open its first foreign branch in the country.
Warnig and Putin had much in common: Putin had served as a KGB spy in the east German city of Dresden before the collapse of communism.
As a convinced communist, Warnig had spied for the Stasi under three cover names — “Hans-Detlef”, “Arthur” and “Economist” — and had been decorated for his service.
He and Putin have denied knowing each other when they were in the field. However, a picture allegedly from Stasi archives shows them together on a joint visit by Stasi and KGB officers to the museum of the 1st Guards Tank Army in Dresden in 1989. The files suggest Warnig also served for a while in Dresden.
A spokesman for the Nord Stream company did not respond to a request for comment.
Whatever the case, their shared history in espionage gave them much to discuss when fate threw them together in St Petersburg. Putin often invited Warnig round to his country home — in those days they drank beer.
When Warnig’s family joined him in Russia, their wives became friends and their children played together; and when Putin’s wife, Lyudmila, was badly injured in a car crash in 1993, Dresdner Bank had her flown to Germany for treatment in a special clinic.
While she was away, Warnig’s wife, Barbel, took care of Putin’s daughter — and the Russian leader is said to have never forgotten the favour. By the time Putin moved to Moscow, becoming prime minister, then president, Warnig was one of his trusted inner circle.
In 2005, Putin was in conversation with a delegation of German businessmen accompanying Schröder on an official visit when the much-mooted subject of a gas pipeline between the two countries surfaced once more.
The vessel Audacia laying the Nord Stream 2 pipeline off Rügen Island on Germany’s Baltic coast
AXEL SCHMIDT/REUTERS
Putin was enthusiastic about Nord Stream: according to one delegate’s account, however, Putin told Schröder that there was only one person he could entrust with such a politically sensitive project and that was Warnig. The ex-secret policeman was duly appointed as Nord Stream’s managing director.
By all accounts, he has been very effective at smoothing over difficulties and setting suspicious minds at rest.
“He’s a very genial, charming person, warm and fuzzy, I can see why Putin likes him,” said Fiona Hill, author of a book about the Russian leader and a former senior director for European and Russian affairs on Trump’s national security council.
She told me how Putin had used the trusted German as a conduit for a “back channel” diplomatic initiative in Washington: through a mutual acquaintance, Warnig had invited her to a meeting at the Iron Gate restaurant near the White House in 2009 when she was the US government’s national intelligence officer for Russia.
“It was a classic Russian play, but he comes across as very warm and genuine, not like a Russian stooge,” she said. “The message was that Putin is not a dictator.” She insisted that the pipeline was not part of the conversation. “He just wanted to inform and influence.”
Soon, 12m steel pipes weighing 24 tonnes and encased in 11 centimetres of concrete were being welded together aboard a giant 300m vessel before being lowered to the bottom of the Baltic Sea at a depth of 100ft. The first sections were inaugurated in 2012.
Gazprom covered about half of the €9.5 billion (£8 billion) cost, the rest being split between European companies, including Royal Dutch Shell.
In 2016, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, considered backing proposed European legislation to give the European Union oversight of the project. But Merkel managed to talk EU leaders out of it and they agreed to a watered-down version leaving oversight of the project to Berlin.
The question Germany and the rest of Europe now faces is how to fuel homes and power factories if supplies are cut off from Russia. Shipments of America’s “freedom gas” have increased and the EU is searching for new energy sources.
Putin faces a similar dilemma as he weighs up the cost to his energy-dependent economy of losing his biggest gas market in Europe. He has recently made a show of reaching out to Beijing, which might be expected to come to Russia’s aid.
Meanwhile things have progressed well for Warnig, even if the latest pipeline, wholly owned by Gazprom, has yet to win approval.
The most powerful foreigner in Russia sits on the boards of various prominent banks and oil and gas companies. While he spends much of his time in Russia, the home where he lives with his second wife, a Russian, and their two children, is in Staufen, in southwestern Germany. More than 1,000 miles from the nearest Russian forces camped on the borders of Ukraine.
2 Likes
This is the sort of Nazi-like propaganda Russian state media is running with to whip up a fake pretext for war.
The chap mentioned as the “source” here, Ilya Kiva, got 5,869 votes nationwide out of 18,893,864 votes cast in the first round of the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election, or 0.03%.
What’s so laughable about all this is that Zelensky is a Russian speaker and his strongest support bases in 2019 were in the east and south of the country.
This is an excellent podcast series. Presented by Gavin Esler formerly of BBC Newsnight.
Do you think they’ll go to war?
Hopefully this doesn’t kick off for all our sakes.
1 Like
There are some balloons out there who would only love it to. For the craic, like.
The attitude among a lot of people online in the west is like the attitude in early March 2020. Blase dismissals of the threat. Jokes, “will it be on Amazon or Disney?” These lads believe that war simply cannot happen in our INTERNET age!
Unfortunately this attitude is mirrored by some western European leaders who refuse to comprehend what they are dealing with, hello Mr. Macron.
I’m not sure Macron is still on tfk. Think he deleted his posts when he got elected.
FEBRUARY 12, 2022, 7:34 PM ET
About the author: Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic , a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism .
Oh, how I envy Liz Truss her opportunity! Oh, how I regret her utter failure to make use of it! For those who have never heard of her, Truss is the lightweight British foreign secretary who went to Moscow this week to tell her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, that his country should not invade Ukraine. This trip was not a success. At a glacial press conference he likened their conversation to “the mute” speaking with “the deaf”; later, he leaked the fact that she had confused some Russian regions with Ukrainian regions, to add a little insult to the general injury.
Lavrov has done this many times before. He was vile to the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, last year. He has been unpleasant at international conferences and rude to journalists. His behavior is not an accident. Lavrov, like Russian President Vladimir Putin, uses aggression and sarcasm as tools to demonstrate his scorn for his interlocutor, to frame negotiations as useless even before they begin, to create dread and apathy. The point is to put other diplomats on the defensive, or else to cause them to give up in disgust.
But the fact that Lavrov is disrespectful and disagreeable is old news. So is the fact that Putin lectures foreign leaders for hours and hours on his personal and political grievances. He did that the first time he met President Barack Obama, more than a decade ago; he did exactly the same thing last week to French President Emmanuel Macron. Truss should have known all of this. Instead of offering empty language about rules and values, she could have started the press conference like this:
Good Evening, ladies and gentlemen of the press. I am delighted to join you after meeting my Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. This time, we have not bothered to discuss treaties he won’t respect and promises he won’t keep. We have told him, instead, that an invasion of Ukraine will carry very, very high costs—higher than he has ever imagined. We are now planning to cut off Russian gas exports completely—Europe will find its energy supplies somewhere else. We are now preparing to assist the Ukrainian resistance, for a decade if need be. We are quadrupling our support for the Russian opposition, and for Russian media too. We want to make sure that Russians will start hearing the truth about this invasion, and as loudly as possible. And if you want to do regime change in Ukraine, we’ll get to work on regime change in Russia.
Truss, or Borrell before her, could have added just a touch of personal insult, in the style of Lavrov himself, and wondered out loud just how it is that Lavrov’s official salary pays for the lavish properties that his family makes use of in London. She could have listed the names of the many other Russian public servants who send their children to schools in Paris or Lugano. She could have announced that these children are now, all of them, on their way home, along with their parents: No more American School in Switzerland! No more pied-à-terres in Knightsbridge! No more Mediterranean yachts!
Of course Truss—like Borrell, like Macron, like the German chancellor who is headed for Moscow this week—would never say anything like this, not even in private. Tragically, the Western leaders and diplomats who are right now trying to stave off a Russian invasion of Ukraine still think they live in a world where rules matter, where diplomatic protocol is useful, where polite speech is valued. All of them think that when they go to Russia, they are talking to people whose minds can be changed by argument or debate. They think the Russian elite cares about things like its “reputation.” It does not.
In fact, when talking to the new breed of autocrats, whether in Russia, China, Venezuela, or Iran, we are now dealing with something very different: People who aren’t interested in treaties and documents, people who only respect hard power. Russia is in violation of the Budapest Memorandum, signed in 1994, guaranteeing Ukrainian security. Do you ever hear Putin talk about that? Of course not. He isn’t concerned about his untrustworthy reputation either: Lying keeps opponents on their toes. Nor does Lavrov mind if he is hated, because hatred gives him an aura of power.
Their intentions are different from ours too. Putin’s goal is not a flourishing, peaceful, prosperous Russia, but a Russia where he remains in charge. Lavrov’s goal is to maintain his position in the murky world of the Russian elite and, of course, to keep his money. What we mean by “interests” and what they mean by “interests” is not the same. When they listen to our diplomats, they don’t hear anything that really threatens their position, their power, their personal fortunes.
Despite all of our talk, no one has ever seriously tried to end, rather than simply limit, Russian money laundering in the West, or Russian political or financial influence in the West. No one has taken seriously the idea that Germans should now make themselves independent of Russian gas, or that France should ban political parties that accept Russian money, or that the U.K. and the U.S. should stop Russian oligarchs from buying property in London or Miami. No one has suggested that the proper response to Putin’s information war on our political system would be an information war on his.
Now we are on the brink of what could be a catastrophic conflict. American, British, and European embassies in Ukraine are evacuating; citizens have been warned to leave. But this terrible moment represents not just a failure of diplomacy, it also reflects a failure of the Western imagination; a generation-long refusal, on the part of diplomats, politicians, journalists, and intellectuals, to understand what kind of state Russia was becoming and to prepare accordingly. We have refused to see the representatives of this state for what they are. We have refused to speak to them in a way that might have mattered. Now it might be too late.
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Not during the Superbowl anyway.
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It would be most Putin-like for him to choose that exact time to go to war.
Mrs Radek Sikorski
This is what she thinks a British foreign secretary should have said? 