10
NEWS
MATTHEW
CAMPBELL
MATTHEW
CAMPBELL
30%
The proportion of EU
energy that already comes
from Russian natural gasSWEDEN
LATVIA RUSSIA
LITHUANIA
POLAND
ESTONIA
DENMARK
GERMANY
FINLAND
UST-LUGA
Start of Nord Stream 2Vyborg
St Petersburg
Concrete
coatingAnti-corrosion
coatingGREIFSWALD
End of Nord Stream 2Steel
pipeAfter the pipeline is laid,
its exact location is
checked. A remotely
operated underwater
vehicle equipped with
cameras sends information(^2) back to the research vessel
120 bcm
(billion cubic meters
of natural gas)
The amount of extra
gas that needs to be
secured for Europe over
the next two decades,
because of falling
production elsewhere
50% less CO 2
The fall in emissions created
by generating electricity
from gas rather than coal
Source: Nord Stream
BALTIC
SEA
Nord Stream 2 is the longest
pipeline in the world and is expected
to double the capacity of the first
pipeline to 110 billion cubic metres
of gas a year, bypassing existing
pipelines through Ukraine and
(^3) Poland, which will lose transit fees
Each pipe joint is 12 metres long, about
two thirds the height of the average
human and weighs 24 tonnes with
its concrete coating
NORD
STREAM 2
764 MILES
NORD STREAM 1
S
omewhere 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, clutch-
ing 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 manag-
ing director of the Nord Stream gas pipe-
line 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 Schrö-
der, 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 dis-
play last week when President Joe 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 pipe-
line’s name — Nord Stream 2 — let alone
publicly agree on shutting it down.
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 chancel-
lor 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 Gaz-
prom 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,
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 civil-
ian 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 pro-
vide 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 bil-
lions 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 Rad-
oslaw Sikorski has compared the pipe-
lines to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact
between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s
Soviet Union to dismember Poland.
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 opera-
tion in Berlin, spearheaded by Schröder
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 Ger-
many 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 chan-
cellor from Schröder in 2005: “Angela,
you got to stop buying gas from Putin.”
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 commer-
cial 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 sup-
port of the pipeline project seemed per-
plexing for a figure whose formative
experience was growing up in East Ger-
many under Warnig’s sinister former
employees, the Stasi.
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 physi-
cist, told the Munich security conference
in 2019.
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
Putin’s gas 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
Shared
history
offered
much to
discuss
Putin
never
forgot
the
favour
DRILLING INTO THE PAST
Vladimir Putin, left, and a man believed to be Matthias Warnig at a 1980s meeting of KGB and Stasi officers in Dresden
UKRAINE CRISIS
BSTU