The Sunday Times - UK (2022-02-13

The Sunday Times February 13, 2022 11

Graphic: Matthew Cornick

1

The pipes are

laid on the

sea bed

Solitaire, a

300m-long

pipe-laying

vessel Pipe support

structure

The steel pipe is welded

together on the ship

before being lowered to

the sea bed. The vessel

has 70,000 horsepower

and can install about

1.9 miles of pipe per day

working around the clock

Tether

management

system

Remotely

operated

vehicle

Research vessel

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Gravel is placed

along some parts

of the route for

pipe stability

Mum left for occupied

Donbas — never to return

LOUISE

CALLAGHANN

One hot day last summer

Iryna Shylo, 27, waved her

mother off at Kyiv’s central

bus station. Natalya, a

53-year-old physics teacher,

was going to visit relatives in

Ukraine’s eastern Donbas

region. Early the next

morning, she messaged to say

she was about to cross into an

area controlled by pro-

Russian separatists. Then she

disappeared.

The next time Shylo would

see her mother’s face was

seven months later, in a video

broadcast on a pro-separatist

TV channel. In it, she sits

wrapped in a grey jacket —

her face pale under strip

lighting — as an interrogator

asks her whether she admits

to the espionage charges

against her.

“No,” she replies, looking

far from the cheerful,

outgoing woman who had

recently been named one of

the best teachers in the

country. “Because I don’t

believe I am a spy.”

Natalya is one of hundreds

of people detained in

appalling conditions by pro-

Russian separatists in eastern

Ukraine. Torture, including

mock executions, sexual

violence and electrocution, is

— according to the UN and

human rights groups —

common.

Now, as the threat of a

Russian invasion builds, the

relatives of those behind bars

fear that they could be left to

die. Still more believe that the

conditions in the prisons

could be replicated across

Ukraine if Russian tanks

rolled over the border.

“Should an invasion take

place, for the people like my

mum the situation would

become extremely difficult,

because then their case

becomes secondary

compared to responding to

the military events,” Shylo

told me when we met in a

café on the outskirts of Kyiv.

Her family is from

Horlivka, a small town

outside Donetsk, about 350

miles from Kyiv. In 2014, after

the Russian invasion of

Crimea, many in the region

voted in an internationally

unrecognised “independence

around half were taken by

Ukrainian government forces

and the rest by armed groups

in the Donbas region. Some of

those detained by the

Ukrainians were suspected of

being loyal to the separatists.

Torture, ill-treatment and

arbitrary detention were

recorded on both sides.

But while the Ukrainian

government has allowed

international monitors to visit

detention sites and has

released many of its

detainees, access is highly

restricted in separatist-

controlled areas, where

detentions have remained an

almost daily occurrence, the

commissioner found.

“The conditions are really

atrocious,” said Yulia

Gorbunova, a senior

researcher at Human Rights

Watch. “They’re being

subjected to ill-treatment and

sometimes torture in pre-trial

detention facilities especially,

mostly to extract

confessions.”

Oleksandra Matviichuk,

the head of the Centre for

Civil Liberties, a Kyiv-based

human rights organisation,

says Ukrainian security

services believe about 300

people are being held in the

occupied territories, but they

were, she said, the tip of the

iceberg. “We don’t

understand the scope of

violence and human rights

abuses going on in this grey

zone where the law does not

exist at all. I personally spoke

with hundreds of people who

were beaten, who were

raped, whose fingers were

cut [off ],” Matviichuk said.

Ihor Kozlovskyi, 67, a

scholar, barely survived his

detention after being taken in

January 2016 from his home

in Donbas. “It would be

beating, electrocutions,” he

told me. “The torturers

would replace each other,

because they would just get

tired of torturing me.”

After a month, he was

taken to a tiny cell where rats

came up through the drains.

He would lecture them on

science and religion, just to

hear a human voice.

Kozlovskyi was freed in

December 2017, after being

accused of possession of

dangerous weapons, and of

being a danger to society — a

charge he said was invented.

@louiseelisabet

Additional reporting:

Iryna Dobrohorska

referendum” that led to its de

facto separation from

Ukraine. Iryna and Natalya

were pro-Ukrainian, and like

many others with the same

beliefs moved west, to

government-controlled areas.

They continued to visit

relatives in the east, including

Shylo’s grandmother.

Yet the last time Shylo had

travelled, in late 2019, there

had been a problem. She had

been stopped at a

checkpoint, and a guard had

looked through her phone

and found a photo of her

posing in front of a Ukrainian

flag. “Are you a Ukrainian

patriot?” he asked her. She

did not reply, and he

eventually let her pass.

Shylo said she did not

know why her mother had

been arrested — but feared

she had been denounced by

someone. In the video,

Natalya was accused of

running a Twitter account

that published information

about the situation in

Horlivka.

Hers is far from an isolated

case. A report by the Office of

the United Nations High

Commissioner for Human

Rights, released last year, said

torture and ill-treatment were

carried out systematically in

several separatist-run

detention sites.

The report found that up to

8,700 people — civilians and

fighters — had been detained

for reasons related to the

conflict since 2014. Of these,

Iryna Shylo with her mother

Natalya, an accused spy

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 com-

mon: 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 his-

tory 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 business-

men accompanying Schröder on an

official visit when the much-mooted

subject of a gas pipeline between the two

countries surfaced once more.

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 Wash-

ington: 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 gov-

ernment’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 compa-

nies, 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-depend-

ent 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 pipe-

line, 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.

@MCinParis

Brandt’s “Ostpolitik”, or “eastern pol-
icy”. His idea was to encourage reform of
the Soviet Union by trading with it and
buying its gas.
That policy was seen to have suc-
ceeded with the collapse of the Soviet
empire and reunification of Germany.
Today, though, the same German argu-
ments about encouraging liberal
democracy in Putin’s Russia have begun
to ring hollow.
No matter how much Schröder ’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.
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.
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

Putin and

Gerhard

Schröder, right,

greet each other

on the former

German leader’s

70th birthday in

St Petersburg

An effort

to give

oversight

to the EU

failed