In the north German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where former German chancellor Angela Merkel was born, ties to Russia run deep — so deep that its leaders have defended a Kremlin project that the US says helped cripple Ukraine.
At issue is a new gas pipeline project, which Germany on Tuesday last week halted in retaliation for Russia’s decision to recognize two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, shortly before it invaded and brought Europe to the brink of a major war.
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is the landfall site for the Nord Stream 2 line that bypasses the former Soviet Republic.
Illustration: Yusha
The US has long said that the line would weaken Ukraine; Germany and Russia insisted the project was purely commercial.
Nonetheless, Washington in 2019 set sanctions on some firms and individuals who were helping to build it, maintaining that the line is a tool for Russia to support aggression against Ukraine.
In January last year, Minister President of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Manuela Schwesig took action to support the Russian project. At her initiative, the state parliament voted to set up a special foundation whose charter said it could acquire, manage, own, provide or let land, tools and machines to help the completion of the pipeline.
“We believe that it is right to build the pipeline,” Schwesig told reporters in January last year. Advocating for the pipeline in the state parliament at the time, Schwesig said that the US sanctions were a matter of self-interest.
“Nobody who is working on building the pipeline is doing anything wrong,” she said. “The ones doing something wrong are those who are trying to stop the pipeline.”
Nord Stream 2 would double the amount of gas Russia can pump directly to Germany, its biggest customer for gas, make Germany and Europe less vulnerable to supply interruptions caused by disputes between Russia and Ukraine, and bring economic benefits to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a relatively deprived region that used to be in the German Democratic Republic.
Yet this year, as Russia stepped up pressure on Ukraine, questions mounted around the foundation, called Klima-und Umweltschutz MV (Climate and Environment Protection Foundation).
It would not reveal who was running its sanctions-busting operation beyond saying that the person was appointed by Nord Stream 2 AG, a company owned by Gazprom PAO, which is fully controlled by the Russian state.
Asked who that was, Swiss-based Nord Stream 2 did not respond, while Gazprom did not respond to a request for comment.
The state Court of Auditors said on Feb. 9 it was concerned that Mecklenburg-Vorpommern had largely given up control of the foundation’s assets.
This meant there was no guarantee that the foundation would always work in the public interest, Court of Auditors spokesman Sebastian Jahn said.
The foundation on Wednesday said that it would stop helping the pipeline project, but declined to say exactly what it had done to aid it so far.
In an account of its first year on its Web site, it said that to complete the pipeline, “the US’ illegal threats had to be countered with a wide range of measures, which for obvious reasons cannot be made the subject of public explanation.”
Public records show it purchased a ship that entered the Baltic in July and which a US Department of State report to the US Congress in November said had engaged in pipe-laying activities on Nord Stream 2 or another sanctioned project.
“We did what is necessary, the pipeline is practically completed,” foundation chairman Erwin Sellering told Norddeutscher Rundfunk in an interview on Wednesday, adding that this involved helping small and medium-sized companies do their work.
“We can say we fulfilled our mandate,” he said.
As Russia continues to pressure Ukraine, other questions are mounting about the links between the pipeline, Germany’s ruling Social Democrat Party (SPD) and Moscow.
Schwesig is, like German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a member of the SPD, which traditionally advocates rapprochement with Russia.
So, too, is former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who has described himself as Putin’s personal friend. One of his last acts in office in 2005 was to sign the deal creating the Nord Stream 2 project. Soon after, he became chairman of the company behind it — the first of several directorial positions he has taken at Russian energy companies.
Now, opposition to his lobbying is becoming increasingly heated across Germany.
Schwesig and Schroeder declined to comment for this story.
In 2019, Scholz rejected the US sanctions as interference in Germany’s affairs, and on Tuesday last week, after Russia formally recognized the two breakaway regions, he decided to halt certification of the pipeline.
However, some analysts say the damage to Germany is already done.
“Russia has succeeded in using the personal interests of prominent German political figures against Germany,” said Marcel Dirsus, a non-resident Fellow at Kiel University’s Institute for Security Policy.
“All this is doubly dangerous for Germany: It allows an adversarial foreign power to influence decisionmaking and it raises questions about Germany’s reliability among the country’s allies,” Dirsus said.
The foundation, in a gray townhouse next to a kebab shop, was funded from 200,000 euros (US$223,578) given by Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, plus 20 million euros from Nord Stream 2.
The foundation said its prime goal was to act against climate change, adding that gas is needed as a clean alternative to coal until Germany can manage on renewable energy.
It promised a free tree and 500 euros to every kindergarten in the state, and said that its secondary goal was to make sure the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was completed, “regardless of external efforts.”
Even though Nord Stream 2 made up the majority of the foundation’s funding, the foundation would not reveal any information about its activities to beat US sanctions.
“Transparency is very important to us,” foundation chief executive officer Christine Klinger said.
However, she added in a later e-mail that as a foundation, her group was not obliged to respond to requests under the regional Freedom of Information laws.
In German law, an endowed foundation must spend all it earns from its capital on a public good; Deutsche Umwelthilfe, an environmentalist group, has said that the foundation has contravened this law.
The group brought a legal challenge against the foundation in March, saying that it served the interests of the Nord Stream 2, a private business, not the public. The case continues.
Watchdog Transparency International said the foundation might have breached legislation to combat money laundering, as its claimed purpose was different from its actual purpose, which was to help Nord Stream 2.
“The mere fact that a foundation that is meant to be devoted to climate and environmental protection is ... supporting the efforts of a Russian state company to build a gas pipeline and dodge international sanctions is questionable, but the fact that the foundation obscures who it is actually benefiting is a possible violation of German and European money-laundering laws,” Transparency International finance expert Stephan Ohme said.
Others with influence over the foundation, such as Gazprom chief executive officer Alexei Miller and Russia, should also have been listed on the foundation’s records in Germany’s national transparency register, Transparency International said.
Sellering dismissed Transparency International’s claims as “total nonsense” in his Norddeutscher Rundfunk interview, saying that it was not true that the foundation’s financial backers had any influence over its actions and that it was simply not wise to comment step-by-step when “disputing a world power.”
He was referring to the US.
The state government is not responsible for listing names in the transparency register or for policing it, a government spokesperson said, declining further comment.
At least three senior members of the regional SPD are closely linked to the foundation: Schwesig, Sellering, who is also a former state premier, and Christian Pegel, a lawyer and former economy minister who introduced the legislation in the regional parliament and whom political colleagues describe as the brains behind it.
Sellering said early last month that the Ukraine crisis was being used as an excuse by “significant forces in the US and Germany who have always opposed the pipeline.”
None of the politicians responded to requests for comment.
As Scholz suspended Nord Stream 2, pressure grew on him to take Schroeder to task for lobbying for Gazprom. Politicians from the opposition and junior coalition party the Free Democratic Party called on the government to strip Schroeder of his privileges as a former chancellor, such as an office with vehicle and staff.
Some said he should repay taxpayer money spent previously if it could in any way be linked to his lobbying activities.
At a meeting with Scholz in the Kremlin last month, Putin lavished praise on Schroeder and Scholz distanced himself from the former chancellor.
“He speaks for himself, not the government,” he said.
In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, support for Nord Stream 2 is broad-based.
The region’s ties to Russia are ancient. Even in the Middle Ages the cities of the German Baltic coast were intimately linked with Russia by sea.
For many years, the region’s Baltic Sea ports had direct ferry and cargo routes to the Russian ports of St Petersburg and Kaliningrad.
Its sea port of Mukran, the East German government’s last major infrastructural project, started in 1982, was meant to create a direct trade link to Russia bypassing Poland, then in a state of turmoil following the declaration of a state of emergency.
Deprived of its purpose after the Soviet Union collapsed, Mukran played an important role in construction of a previous pipeline and was used as a place to store materials before they were shipped to lay Nord Stream 2, a spokesperson said.
For Torsten Koplin, regional head of the hard-left Die Linke party, which is the successor to the East German Communist Party, the Russian connection goes beyond economic gains.
He said that locals see the trade Nord Stream 2 as an opportunity to preserve peace.
On the street near the foundation, office worker Roland Bentler echoed that view.
He asked whether freezing the pipeline “really was the most urgent decision” that Germany’s government needed to take in the Ukraine crisis.
“Positions will harden, but I hope that reason will win out in the end and that gas will flow, not blood,” he said.
Additional reporting by Andreas Rinke in Berlin and Vladimir Soldatkin in Moscow
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