Анджела Стент - Putin's World - Russia Against the West and with the Rest

Russia’s 2015 commemoration of the end of World War Two illustrates Merkel’s careful approach. Putin invited Schroeder in 2005 to attend the sixtieth anniversary Victory Day Parade in Moscow’s Red Square, the first time a German leader had been invited to these celebrations of the defeat of Nazi Germany. It was an emotional moment for Schroeder, whose father died on the Eastern Front in 1944 six months after he was born. 53But in 2015, with a war raging in Ukraine, no Western leader attended the seventieth anniversary Victory Day Parade. Instead, the Chancellery announced that although Angela Merkel would not attend the May 9 Moscow celebration, she would lay a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the Kremlin’s Alexander Gardens with President Putin the following day. This was Merkel’s dual message: reluctance to give official endorsement to Vladimir Putin’s parade of military might while armed conflict continued in Ukraine but recognition that, because of Berlin’s special historical responsibilities toward Moscow, Germany must continue to show respect to Russian citizens for the sacrifices they endured during the war.

In January 2016, Lisa, a thirteen-year-old Russian-German girl in Berlin disappeared for thirty hours. When she resurfaced, she claimed she had been abducted and raped by Middle Eastern migrants. Russian television and internet sites began broadcasting this news, accusing Merkel of disregarding the legitimate security fears of her citizens. Indeed, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov went on television accusing Germany of a “cover-up” and of “whitewashing reality to make it politically correct.” Steinmeier called Moscow’s reaction “political propaganda.” 54A demonstration of 700 protestors demanding justice for Lisa took place outside the Chancellery in Berlin. The German police conducted an exhaustive inquiry and concluded that Lisa had made up the story because she had quarreled with her parents and spent the night out with a male friend. The police presented all the information to the Russian government, only to have Lavrov appear once more on television and repeat the charges. This deliberate Russian deception infuriated the Chancellery. Some Germans saw this as a Kremlin effort to undermine Merkel herself. Germany’s anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim Far Right parties also joined pro-Russian demonstrations, as did the Far Left, reinforcing both the image and reality that the Kremlin was actively engaged in supporting anti-government groups of all political stripes through a coordinated media and social network campaign. This was the “Russian world” in action.

The Kremlin has targeted the “Russian world” inside Germany to undermine Merkel’s policies. Following on the wave of patriotic sentiment inside Russia after the annexation of Crimea, the Kremlin appealed to various groups in Germany, particularly Germans of Russian descent. Despite the fact that they had left Russia, many felt like second-class citizens in Germany and had failed to integrate. Russia also played on anti-immigrant feelings in Germany. Many Germans believed that Merkel, by encouraging migrants fleeing the civil war in Syria or the instability in Afghanistan to come to Germany, was endangering the safety of Germans—and taking their jobs.

Germans remain deeply divided about Russia, and the Kremlin has done its utmost to play on these differences. Since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis, successive groups of current and former German politicians—including former chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Gerhard Schroeder, and former foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher—supported by journalists and prominent academics, criticized Merkel’s tough stance on Russia and called for an end to sanctions and a return to close ties with Moscow. Their arguments have been rebutted by those who reject a return to business as usual. In 2016, 64 percent of Germans said that Vladimir Putin’s Russia was not a credible partner for Germany, although 38 percent of East Germans thought Berlin’s policy was too anti-Russian (the figure was 22 percent for West Germans). Yet despite the growing disenchantment with Russia, 57 percent of those questioned said that German soldiers should not go to defend NATO members Poland and the Baltic states if they were attacked by Russia. 55The image of Germany as a peaceful power that rejects militarism and can be an honest broker tempering hostility between Russia and the West continues to resonate deeply in German society. Meanwhile, in Russia, just over half the population holds an unfavorable view of Germany, while 35 percent hold a favorable view. 56

German pro-Russian sentiment is often inversely correlated to German views of the United States. This was vividly illustrated by the Edward Snowden affair. Snowden, the NSA employee who fled to Hong Kong and then to Russia in 2013 with millions of stolen classified files, was given political asylum by Vladimir Putin, who portrayed this as a humanitarian gesture. Snowden claimed that the NSA was spying on US citizens—and also on foreigners. He revealed that 500 million pieces of personal data were intercepted every month in Germany. Worse still, in a country that continues to deal with the dual secret police legacies of Hitler’s Gestapo and the East German Stasi, was the revelation that the NSA apparently was also eavesdropping on Merkel’s personal cell phone. 57She was, needless to say, greatly angered by this. Snowden received an award from a prominent German human rights organization, and some of the members of a Bundestag committee looking into NSA activities in Germany recommended that Berlin grant him political asylum. For Putin, Snowden was a gift that kept on giving. Not only did Snowden’s revelations cause major strains in the US-Germany relationship, but they also fed into the Kremlin’s narrative that the United States was a major human rights violator.

Angela Merkel continues to walk a fine line between keeping the sanctions regime in place and not neglecting entirely German business interests in Russia. The Nord Stream II pipeline represents the essence of this balancing act. In 2015, the Nord Stream consortium, run by Matthias Warnig and in which Gazprom has a majority stake, signed an $11 billion shareholder agreement with five European companies—some of which subsequently dropped out—to build a second gas pipeline that would carry 55 billion cubic meters of gas to Germany and Europe while bypassing Ukraine. This was at a time when gas prices were falling and Nord Stream was operating at 70 percent capacity. The project generated a great deal of controversy. On the face of it, this expansion of the network would appear to involve technical and legal issues. But its geopolitical implications were significant, given the tensions between Russia and Europe and the ongoing fighting in Ukraine. The arguments in favor of the project were that Europe’s gas demand would rise by 2020 while domestic supplies decline, and the new pipeline would fill these increased needs. Ukraine had raised transit rates for gas, increasing Russia’s interest in building the pipeline. Moreover, the Ukrainian pipeline system is in need of repair and lacks investment, and the Ukrainian energy sector remains corrupt. The arguments against the project were that it contravened the EU’s goals of diversification of supplies, it would deprive Ukraine of $2.3 billion of much-needed transit revenues, it would endanger Europe’s energy security, and it would cause environmental damage. In the eyes of most Central European states, it was a Russian geopolitical project rather than an energy deal, designed to give Russia greater influence over Europe. While the European Commission considered its relative merits, Merkel took a neutral stance, insisting that commercial factors would ultimately decide whether it went ahead. This was her concession to the business community in return for their continuing support for sanctions. But few view this project as strictly commercial. Indeed, at the July 2018 NATO summit in Brussels, Donald Trump accused Germany of being “captive” to Russia because of Nord Stream. 58