© REUTERS via Sputnik/Alexei Nikolsky/Kremlin

From the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel has been the staunchest defender of EU sanctions. But since early June, she has been facing a rebellion from within her own country: Regional leaders from eastern Germany—including prominent members of her own Christian Democratic Union—have publicly called for an end to the sanctions.

Much of it is electioneering. Saxony and Brandenburg will hold regional elections on September 1; Thuringia follows on October 27. In all three states, the right-wing, populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which is very close to Russia, is expected to do extremely well. Calling to lift the sanctions is an attempt to woo back at least some votes.

The timing, however, could not be worse. Russia is back in the headlines after police cracked down brutally on demonstrations against President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on the last weekend in July. More than 1,300 demonstrators were detained for taking part in an unsanctioned rally; many of them could face harsh sentences. The protests were kicked off by the decision of Russian election officials to bar opposition candidates from running in local elections in Moscow scheduled for September 8.

That same weekend saw Russia’s best-known opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, briefly released from prison to be treated for what officials said was an “allergic shock.” His doctor, in contrast, said it was possible he was poisoned. Navalny is serving a 30-day prison term for calling on Russians to demonstrate. From a moral point of view, a soft stance on Putin seems rather questionable right now.

The Local Cost of Sanctions

Yet the prime ministers of all five east German Länder had joined the call for lifting the sanctions, and even after the violence in Moscow, not one of them chose to speak out against Putin’s regime. When Bild, Germany’s most popular tabloid, asked them to comment on the events, they either declined to answer or said they could not judge the situation.

“I don’t have any detailed information about the reports from Moscow,” said Saxony’s Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer, a member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, according to Bild. “I therefore cannot make a judgment.”

Kretschmer has been in office for less than two years and is now fighting a difficult reelection campaign against the AfD. He was the first to call for an end to the EU sanctions after meeting with Putin at a business conference in early June. He clearly is proud of that encounter: At some of his election rallies, he has displayed a giant photo of his tête-à-tête with the Russian president.

Certainly, there is an economic argument to be made against the EU sanctions. They have hit the eastern part of Germany much harder than the western part. In the east, it was mostly mid-sized engineering companies with a tradition of doing business with Russia who suffered most. The uncertainty of the political environment and the threat of US sanctions against Russia hurting European companies weighs on them particularly heavily.

According to the Ost-Ausschuss der Deutschen Wirtschaft, an organization set up by German industry to help business with Russia and Eastern Europe, eastern Germany’s trade with Russia declined by 28.7 percent from 2013 and 2018. In western Germany, it only shrunk by 17 percent during the same time. In Saxony, the decline was truly dramatic, at 72.5 percent from 2013 to 2018. Not all of this is due to the sanctions, however—Russia’s economic woes and the reorientation of German companies toward western markets or to China also played a role.

Ostalgie 2020

In any case, trade figures alone cannot explain eastern Germany’s soft stance on Russia which doesn’t even make the top ten of Saxony’s export destinations. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is a curious manifestation of identity politics, fed by nostalgia for the certainties of life in the German Democratic Republic and resentment over being belittled by West Germans.

It’s powerful—the AfD, for one, plays it very skillfully. Politicians from other parties also say that in talks with their constituents, concerns about Germany’s relations with Russia come up regularly. But it is also a strange twist on history. After all, East Germany’s 1989 revolution—a source of enormous pride for this part of the county, and for good reason—was directed against a regime set up and kept alive by Moscow since 1945.

It was Russian tanks that quelled the 1953 uprising in East Berlin and guaranteed the communist regime’s power for the following decades. In 1989, East German protesters cheered the Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, but they still feared his army of more than 500,000 soldiers stationed across the GDR.

Once the miracle of Germany’s peaceful reunification had happened, eastern German cities and towns were quick to rename the many streets that had been dedicated to “German-Soviet Friendship.” Schools were only too happy to drop the unpopular mandatory Russian lessons from their curricula. Freedom, in the aftermath of 1989, meant opening up to the West as an antithesis of the old, eastern regime.

“There are many people in eastern Germany who have recently come to see the break in the relationship with Eastern Europe more regretfully and critically,” said Astrid Lorenz, a professor for political science from Leipzig University, in an interview with tagesschau.de “This is interesting because for a long time, people looked mostly toward the West and measured themselves against Western values, policies and affluence.”

Merkel Not Invited

Lorenz speaks of a “changed perception of identity” which is also reflected in the call to end sanctions against Russia. “All over central and eastern Europe, a new self-confidence has evolved over the past few years against the EU that is seen as being dominated by the West. In eastern Germany, this manifests in a similar fashion in a rebellion against federal politics.”

Ironically, federal politics in Germany is led by the most prominent east German of all: Angela Merkel lived the first half of her life in the GDR but has very little sympathy for Vladimir Putin and his repressive regime. Today, Merkel is so disliked in large parts of eastern Germany, mainly but not only because of her policy on refugees in 2015/16, that local Christian Democrats do not want the chancellor to speak at any of their election rallies.

Merkel has been careful not to comment on that. Nor has she criticized eastern German leaders for their sanctions initiative. Still, Michael Kretschmer and his colleagues are treading between Merkel and Putin.

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© REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

Now that Germany has agreed with France and other member states on new EU regulations for the controversial Nord Stream 2 project, the path for the pipeline to be built seems clear. Nevertheless, the German government is mistaken if it believes that it has satisfied its critics with this deal. Berlin has, from the beginning, underestimated the damage this project would do to its image. Its support for Nord Stream 2 demonstrates how the German government puts the national interest ahead of European and international strategic questions, thereby hurting its credibility in the long-term.

Amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and with the help of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the discussion about Germany and the EU’s energy independence from Russia has continued to intensify since 2014. The German government claimed for years that this was a purely commercial endeavor. But then in April 2018, at a meeting with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Chancellor Angela Merkel recognized for the first time that the political factors surrounding Nord Stream 2 also had to be taken into account. By not turning against the project, the German government supported it from the start. Sigmar Gabriel, formerly the economy and energy minister and later foreign minister, assured Vladimir Putin at a 2015 meeting in Moscow that he would personally campaign to have the project under German jurisdiction. While the current agreement does not achieve that, Germany is nevertheless now responsible for negotiating the EU regulations and possible exceptions to them. And yet the objectives and repercussions of Nord Stream 2 go beyond Germany and run counter to German and EU interests.

Russian vs. Ukrainian Interests

From a Russian perspective, building Nord Stream 2 is about securing its most important gas market, the EU, with another pipeline. In addition, Nord Stream 2 and Turk Stream are meant to make the Ukrainian transit-pipeline system superfluous, undermining Ukraine’s bargaining position vis-a-vis Russia and punishing it for its pro-EU stance. At the same time, the pipeline gives political Russia, which is closely tied to the economy, another connection to the EU and makes it possible to create dependencies with businesses and politicians on the local and national levels. Big infrastructure projects with European companies stabilize the Putin system because the Russian firms involved in construction are owned by people close to President Putin and generate additional funds with these projects. That strengthens the Putin system, which is based on loyalty through corruption. The economic cost, then, no longer matters.

The consequences for Ukraine are the loss of transit fees worth 3 billion euros a year and, even more importantly, the loss of a bargaining chip against possible Russian aggression. That can have an effect on the security-policy stability of the Sea of Asov and the Black Sea. If Nord Stream 2 is built by the end of the year, the Kremlin could take it as a signal to conquer the land bridge between Crimea and the Russian mainland and further expand its military activities at Ukraine’s southern ports. Ukraine would no longer have a way to exert pressure on Russia. The fact that EU member states are promoting the project also has a psychological effect, as many Ukrainians ask themselves how much support they are really getting from the EU in their difficult situation.

Domestic Policy Comes First

It all raises the question of to what extent the German government truly realizes the strategic consequences of its policy and how the pipeline undermines other elements of its foreign and security policy. If Foreign Minister Heiko Maas wants to be more considerate of central and eastern European neighbors in the framework of his new European Ostpolitik, the support for Nord Stream 2 is a glaring contradiction. If the German government wants to bring peace to the conflict in the Donbass and stabilize and support reforms in Ukraine in the long-term, it is doing exactly the opposite with this policy. If the cohesion of the EU is a strategic goal of Berlin, then it shouldn’t weaken the EU’s Energy Union. Here is a shortage of foresight and strategic depth in a country that has been discussed as the leading power in Europe and promotes multilateralism as Angela Merkel did at the Munich Security Conference recently.

The support for Nord Stream 2 is not primarily governed by a foreign and security policy logic but rather is part of a domestic negotiation process. If the Chancellor needed the SPD’s support for the sanctions against Russia in the context of the annexation of Crimea and war in eastern Ukraine, then Nord Stream 2 was part of an offer of cooperation made to Russia, under the approach: deterrence where necessary and cooperation where possible. The pressure the federal government faced from economy representatives, but above all from states like Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Brandenburg, seemed to be more important than the security interests of countries like Sweden, Poland, or the Baltic states. In foreign policy terms, the price for this domestic negotiation process seemed to be calculable. But the longer the chancellor tried to sit this project out—in the process helping it succeed—the worse it got.

Of course, the federal government couldn’t have anticipated Donald Trump using Nord Stream 2 as a bargaining chip for a trade deal with the EU and threatening sanctions to extract more concessions for the export of US-LNG to Europe. But to still believe that economic and energy projects could satisfy the Russian leadership, that political change will follow economic convergence, is a sign of a political inability to learn. Despite trade, Russia is waging war in the EU’s direct neighborhood. Despite the exports of oil and gas to the EU, Russia has annexed Crimea, interfered in member-state elections with disinformation campaigns, and systematically destabilized the western Balkans. A strategic partner has become a strategic adversary, one that is using the pipeline to exacerbate transatlantic and intra-European divisions.

Seeking Strategic Change

The German chancellor’s attempts to get President Putin to keep sending gas through Ukraine after Nord Stream 2 is finished will fail. Doing so would contradict the Kremlin’s strategic objectives of weakening the current Ukrainian leadership ahead of the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections and keeping Ukraine in its sphere of influence in the long-term. Economy Minister Altmaier will also fail to get Donald Trump to change course by offering to buy more US LNG—Trump is, after all, interested not in Nord Stream 2 but in a new trade deal with the EU. Nor it will be possible to stop the US Congress from sanctioning companies involved in the construction of the pipeline if Democrats and Republicans believe sanctions are in their interest for domestic political reasons. And there is one other key truth: Putin wants this project for the strategic reasons listed above, and he will build it whatever it costs.

If the German government now made a political push to stop the pipeline, the participating companies would take legal action in response to the withdrawal of already approved permits, which could get expensive for Berlin. That’s not to mention the fact that Berlin has no political interest in stopping construction at this point and doing further damage to its relations with Moscow. So Berlin is in a dead-end. Only completing the project can, from this perspective, bring peace and quiet. Is the answer to keep playing for time?

Foreign Policy without Strategy

The fight about Nord Stream 2 and the failure of the sitting-it-out policy are symptomatic of Germany’s loss of prestige and relevance on the international stage. The discussions around this project were supposed to give Germany cause to rethink its foreign policy, which currently lacks both vision and long-term strategy. There is nothing less at stake than the question of whether Germany is still capable of leading the EU when it comes to Russia and Eastern Europe policy, and of being taken seriously by Washington on the important strategic questions. Germany and the EU need a long-term strategy for how to deal with corrupt and kleptocratic Russian elites, and for how to integrate into Europe a Russia that is more than Vladimir Putin. For that to work, Berlin needs to be able to negotiate on equal footing, not to support big infrastructure projects that give the current Russian leadership openings to influence and divide the EU. And for that, in turn, it needs to be capable of military action, willing to intervene in the neighborhood and internationally—within an EU or NATO framework if necessary—and to have a clear definition of what responsibility Germany and the EU want to and can take on in this changing world.

There is no more “comfort zone Europe”. The longer that German elites deny international realities and do not seriously work towards a strategic realignment of their policies towards Russia, China, and the US, the more irrelevant Germany and the EU will become in the strategic power competition of the multipolar world order. Russia is a strategic adversary that is trying to weaken the EU from the inside and in its neighborhood. The EU is no longer a development model for the Russian elite; from a Russian perspective it seems incapable of action. Why make concessions to a weak opponent if those concessions help secure the opponent’s financial survival? Now the task of the German foreign-policy elite is to fill the strategic vacuum. The fight about Nord Stream 2 was supposed to be an opportunity to fundamentally rethink things and leave this dead-end. Only a realigned European Union with a Germany that is capable of action will be able to meet today’s global challenges.

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© REUTERS/Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin

Politics, they say, makes for strange bedfellows. After 13 tense years knowing each other, it’s hard to imagine Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin engaging in political pillow talk. The two speak each other’s languages but their leadership styles—and goals—couldn’t be further apart. But in the Black Sea resort of Sochi this week, Russia’s president welcomed the re-elected German chancellor to his summer residence and both made an effort to accentuate the positive.

At a joint press conference after talks on Friday, Merkel and Putin made clear that pragmatism was the order of the day. Their countries’ bilateral interests outweigh the differences and, increasingly, they find themselves united against the Trump White House.

Four years ago bilateral relations dipped below freezing point after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the wider Ukraine conflict. In all-night talks, Merkel took the lead in Western diplomatic efforts, facing down Putin in Minsk to produce a peace process named after the Belarussian capital.

That roadmap remains fragile but not even regular violations of its terms are enough to hold back a thaw as summer approaches. The Russian president welcomed Merkel with  pink and white roses. Merkel came empty-handed, but bearing with a diplomatic bouquet.

“We have a strategic interest in having good relations to Russia,” said Merkel. Serious, ongoing policy differences that were obvious from their “open exchanges” did not mean the two countries did not have “areas in which we are completely of one opinion.” On her wavelength, Putin said “differing analyses of this situation or that” did not alter how Germany remains a “key partner” for Russia. “Solving problems is not possible when one does not engage in dialogue with one another,” he added.

Though ongoing disagreement over Ukraine featured in their talks, their joint press conference made clear that it has been displaced by more pressing problems. The American decision to disown the Iran nuclear deal, Merkel said, was no reason for the rest of the world to walk away from a agreement that, though not perfect, offered more control, security, and transparency than no deal. “It would be becoming for Iran to say now, ‘we want to continue to observe this obligation,’” she said.

With a typically wily flourish, Putin invited Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad to his Sochi residence a day before Merkel. At the press conference with his German visitor Putin called on Western countries to make a greater effort on the humanitarian front in the war-torn country. European leaders counter such calls by saying Russia, as his main backer, should bankroll any reconstruction effort. As long as Assad is president, they have refused to provide anything more than humanitarian assistance to Syria.

Show of Unity

Perhaps the greatest show of unity between the two leaders was in facing down US criticism of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. This is the second pipeline, currently under construction, to carry Russian natural gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea. It follows the first Nord Stream pipeline that opened in 2011. Ukraine fears an alternative route for Russian gas will see a drop of deliveries through its territory, opening the door to further energy standoffs with Moscow and a subsequent fall in transit charges which comprise around 4 percent of Ukraine’s annual budget.

Merkel insisted gas delivered must continue through Ukraine while Putin declared the project, controlled by the state-owned Gazprom concern, as an economic not political project. Russia would continue these deliveries, he said, “as long as they make economic sense and sense for all involved”.

Trump administration energy experts in Berlin on Thursday called Nord Stream 2 “a bad idea … from a geopolitical perspective” that was “potentially … an elevated sanctions risk.” Sandra Oudkirk, deputy assistant secretary of state for energy diplomacy, said Russian guarantees to keep supplying Ukraine with Russian gas were “unenforceable.” Washington would continue diplomatic efforts on this front, she said, but recalled how last August the US congress voted for sanctions against companies involved in the pipeline project.

Making light of such tough talk, in a show of the thaw with Germany, Putin joked on Friday in Sochi that US opposition to the Nord Stream project was perhaps the only point of continuity between the Obama and Trump administrations.

The Russian and German leaders share too much history to become bedfellows in this life. But the Sochi thaw suggests the two are pragmatic enough to move on, sharing the belief that, in politics, there are no friends—only shared interests.

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© REUTERS/Pavel Golovkin/Pool

Mr. Voigt, is Germany’s view of Russia special? Well, every relationship between one nation and another is special; many countries claim to have a special relationship with the United States, the British do and so do we. Naturally, in light of our history, we do have a special relationship with Russia – but so do others, including the Poles. They have a very negative one! In the Russian mind, the German-Russian relationship has always been important but not always negative. At the Congress of Vienna – or later the Congress of Berlin – Russia, the Habsburg monarchy, Britain, France, and Prussia were all part of a concert of European powers. Some want to return to this constellation. I’ve had Russian counterparts tell me that we need to revive this concept of a concert of big powers – a kind of a new Yalta conference, but this time with Germany, not about Germany. This is the exact opposite of what most German politicians think. It would also be unacceptable to the German public and run counter to our national interests. In our relationship with Russia in particular, we have to consider the interests of our neighbors in Eastern Europe, especially if they are part of NATO and the EU. Our allegiance to them and the EU is fundamental.

The Kremlin seems to be trying to drive wedges between EU member countries. I first visited Russia in the 1970s, and there’s always been a misunderstanding about the substance and character of European integration. But this is not a problem exclusive to Russia – the US president is also struggling with it.

But within your own party, the Social Democrats (SPD), there has been an ongoing debate about taking a softer tone with Moscow. Nostalgia for Ostpolitik seems to play a role, often seen as the good times … You have to remember that the “good times” started at a very low point – after the building of the Berlin Wall. There was a need for change. And that’s how the SPD started its détente strategy, with the assumption that the character of the Cold War could change over time. The SPD has always believed in a policy of cooperation and dialogue – something that has often been misunderstood as being too soft. That is a misreading of détente policy. Today the SPD leadership is very realistic about how Moscow’s policy has changed. Be it for internal or external reasons, Russia no longer wants to develop a Western-style democracy, and Moscow’s behavior toward Ukraine was totally unacceptable. The SPD therefore supported sanctions. Beyond that, we have to realistically assume that Russian policy has taken a negative turn over a long period of time, so it might take years before its policy takes a turn for the better again. That means in the foreseeable future, we have to test whether there are areas for useful cooperation in spite of these negative trends.
The annexation of Crimea did indeed spark internal discussions in the SPD, for example with Egon Bahr, the architect of Ostpolitik who died in 2015. But because of the changes in Russia’s policy, I myself – like former Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and MP Gernot Erler, the government’s coordinator for relations with Russia – adjusted my position on Moscow accordingly.
Generally, those who sympathize with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his policies are often members of the older generation. Some are Social Democrats, but there are also people like Horst Teltschik, foreign policy adviser to former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and others from Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU party. For them, “east of us” is still dominated by the memory of the Soviet Union. Today, Russia is still a major player east of the EU and NATO. But it is not more important than our relationships inside the EU and NATO, including ties with our smaller and medium-sized eastern neighbors. The younger generations have grown up with independent Baltic states and Ukraine. The older generation has difficulties grappling with the changed geopolitical situation. For the young, it is unthinkable to support someone who rules in an authoritarian way or who cracks down on homosexuality. Therefore they wouldn’t trust Putin.

Do you think it’s problematic that Putin’s Russia is often seen as a normal country, when in fact it is a kleptocratic system? We also find that in a lot of other countries. In Ukraine, political oligarchs are even more numerous than in Russia, so the problem is not unique to Russia. Regrettably, you find it in Romania and Bulgaria as well, both members of the EU.

You mean we have to live with it? No, we stand for our values. These values and principles were formulated in the Paris Charter, which the Soviet Union signed. Russia has not withdrawn its signature – but it is violating the agreement. That doesn’t mean that the values of the Paris Charter are rendered invalid! They are still valid, but we cannot change Russia from outside; we can only help when it wants to change. The same is true for Ukraine.

The Kremlin thinks it can make a difference in Western elections … Yes but that’s actually nothing new, either. When I was leader of the SPD youth wing in the 1970s, there were constant attempts to influence certain elements within our party. Today those attempts have taken on a different character. Moscow is no longer defending Marxism-Leninism, and the ideological component has become less important. It has changed but not disappeared. The geostrategic conditions are very different now. The SPD leadership knows that very well.

How powerful is Russia today? On one side it is the most powerful nuclear state, together with the US. Russia’s sheer size gives it a lot of weight not only in Europe but also in large parts of Asia and the Middle East. In that sense, it’s a world power. In other areas, though, it is a regional power, and economically, it is limited. The Russians are looking to regain their old status and that shouldn’t come as a surprise. But to be strong militarily and weak economically is in the long run not a stable foundation for a country aspiring to be a world power. Obviously, Putin thinks that he can separate technical modernization from societal modernization, but that is not likely to work. I deeply regret that Russia is stagnating; its society is deadlocked, even though they think they’re moving forward. This is bad for Russia and also for us. Russia is the biggest potential challenge and partner east of the EU, while for the US, China is the biggest challenge and partner. What many Russians have interpreted as America’s deliberate attempts to limit Moscow’s influence were in reality a lack of interest in Russia.

Moscow certainly has made some waves in the US of late. Yes, they have regained the attention of the US, but in a negative context. Whether the presidency of Donald Trump is a success for them, well, I have my doubts.

Read more in the Berlin Policy Journal App – May/June 2017 issue.

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