the times | Wednesday February 23 2022 11News
Germany’s decision yesterday to halt
the Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines from
Russia prompted praise from its allies,
and an ominous threat from Moscow.
Two hours after the announcement
Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of
President Putin’s security council,
warned Europeans that their gas prices
would double “very soon”.
It crystallised why Berlin had been
reluctant to stop the project. The twin
Nord Stream 2 pipelines, built to carry
up to 55 billion cubic metres of natural
gas a year along the floor of the Baltic
Sea, were completed last summer
against the strident objections of many
of Germany’s neighbours.
Allies such as the US, Britain and
Poland had castigated Germany’s reli-
ance on Russian gas, described by Boris
Johnson last week as a “hypodermic
drip feed”, and its supposed indiffer-
ence to the risk of undermining
Ukraine by establishing an alternative
route for Moscow to pump the fuel into
central and northern Europe.
Yanking out Nord Stream 2, the new-
est of those needles, is likely to hurt. It
is not just that Germany is forgoing
enough gas to meet at least a third of its
rapidly expanding needs: Russia has all
the instruments to inflict a consider-
able amount of pain on German house-
holds, and by extension to create a pol-
itical headache for Olaf Scholz, the
Social Democratic (SPD) chancellor.
Medvedev’s threat that European gas
prices would exceed €2,000 per 1,
cubic metres, a little over twice their
present level, was anything but idle.
Germany gets just over half its gas
from Russia, by way of the original
Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic,
the Yamal pipeline through Belarus
and Poland and the Transgas network
through Ukraine and central Europe.
Until now German consumers have
been shielded from the turmoil on the
European gas exchanges by their
energy suppliers’ contracts with Russia.
Last week Putin noted that Russia’s
commitment to “honouring” these
contracts had suppressed prices tobetween a fifth and a third of the nor-
mal market rate. The implicit threat
was a huge increase in energy bills if
Berlin misbehaved: Moscow could
renege on the contracts or further con-
strain the flow of gas to the West.
Medvedev did not pluck the €2,
figure out of thin air. During a supply
crunch before Christmas benchmarkPresident Macron has been left red-
faced after his much-touted diplomatic
efforts failed to persuade Russia to
de-escalate the Ukraine crisis.
He had announced that he would
broker US-Russian peace talks and,
after calls to both President Putin and
President Biden, sent an email saying
the two had agreed “in principle” to a
summit. Just hours later Putin said he
would recognise the independence of
two breakaway regions in the Donbas
region of eastern Ukraine.
French presidential candidates were
quick to accuse Macron of empty
grandstanding in the run-up to April’s
election. Marine Le Pen, the hard-right
nationalist who is polling in second
place, said Macron “tried to use this
diplomatic sequence to support the
launch of his campaign”.
She added: “All that is very artistic
but it’s not serious to use this subject
for public relations. Now, because ofMacron ‘was played for a fool’ by Putin
this failure, he is delaying the start of
his campaign.”
Macron is not expected to announce
his candidacy for another week.
Éric Zemmour, the anti-Islam candi-
date, said Macron’s shuttle diplomacy
was “a failure because we are seen by
the Russians like Washington’s little
messenger boy”.
Both Le Pen and Zemmour support
Putin’s claim that Nato threatens
Russian security.
Valérie Pécresse, the candidate of the
Republicans party, said Putin had
played Macron “for a fool”, adding:
“He cast himself centre stage going to
Moscow all alone. He should have gone
with the German chancellor and repre-
sentatives of the EU.”
The Minsk II accord was thrashed
out in 2015 by France and Germany and
is part of the so-called “Normandy
format”, a negotiating framework with
Russia that was opened under Presi-
dent Hollande.
The deal, named after the Belarusiancapital where it was settled, was never
fully implemented. It has been roundly
criticised for its ambiguity, which led to
Russia and Ukraine coming to starkly
different interpretations.
Kyiv said it had signed under duress
and rejected a formula to reintegrate
the separatist regions into Ukraine by
giving Moscow a veto over aspects of
Ukrainian politics. Russia refused to let
Ukraine resume control of the eastern
frontier until the breakaway regions
held elections with their new status.
Some French analysts said the ac-
cords could have been implemented if
Europe had shown the will to force a
compromise. “It would have pleased no
one, neither the Russians nor the
Ukrainians, but it would have been
completely possible, for example, to
send UN peacekeepers into the Donbas
or to set up a provisional administra-
tion. But no one dared to take on these
proposals,” Antoine Arjakovsky, a
Paris-based academic specialist on
Ukraine, told France-Info radio.Charles Bremner ParisAfter the US pulled its diplomats out of
Ukraine to Poland on Monday, its
embassy has come in for criticism over
a snide meme on its Twitter feed.
Four photo of Kyiv’s churches, built
in the Ukrainian capital between the
10th and 12th centuries, were contrast-
ed with four unchanging photographs
of a forest, captioned “Moscow”.
The post, which painted Kyiv as a
thriving, civilised centre at a time when
Moscow was a backwater, was lambast-
ed as crude and unhelpful to efforts to
head off the biggest conflict in Europe
since the Second World War.
Russia’s embassies have a history of
ill-mannered and aggressive posts but
observers lamented the US stooping to
the same level. Ben Judah, a fellow at
the Atlantic Council think tank, said
the post dragged US diplomacy into“ethno-medieval territory”. The Amer-
ican post appeared to be a response to
President Putin’s claim, during his ad-
dress on Monday that signalled his for-
mal authorisation of military action,
that Ukraine was historically Russian.US embassy lambasted for
Twitter jibe at Moscow
Hugh Tomlinson WashingtonThe meme was lamented by western
commentators as crude and unhelpfulFinland will reassess plans to build
a Russian-backed nuclear reactor
because of security risks.
Rosatom, the Russian atomic
energy company, owns a third of
the proposed Hanhikivi project,
which would supply about 10 per
cent of Finland’s electricity.
The Finnish defence ministry
said it would carry out a fresh risk
analysis following warnings that
Russia could exploit its energy
leverage or use proceeds to
manufacture nuclear weapons.
President Niinistö said that if
Russia made further incursions
into Ukraine relations between
Russia and the EU would “end up
colder than during the Cold War”.Finns rethink
reactor plan
Oliver MoodyNews
war into the stark light of day
You will pay for cancelling
gas pipelines, vows Russia
prices in Europe briefly rose above
€2,200 per 1,000 cubic metres.
For Scholz’s coalition government,
whose approval ratings are flagging, in
part because of the rising cost of living,
a gas price surge could be excruciating.
Germany is not the only European
country with this problem — some of
the Baltic states still rely on Russia for
three quarters of their gas.
Berlin, however, is caught in a unique
trap of its own making. For the best part
of two decades successive governments
have based their energy policies on the
availability of affordable Russian gas.
In the early 2000s Gerhard Schröder,
the SPD chancellor, ushered in the
Nord Stream project and laid much of
the ground for its successor while an-
nouncing a retreat from nuclear power.
He now earns his crust as chairman of
Rosneft, the Russian state energy con-
glomerate, and as head of the share-
holders’ committee at Nord Stream.
Angela Merkel not only defended
Nord Stream 2 and embraced
Schröder’s exit from atomic energy, but
also approved the sale of Germany’s
largest gas storage facility to Gazprom,
Rosneft’s sister company, before
brokering a deal for her country to pull
out of coal.
On Merkel’s watch, Germany, unlike
most of its neighbours, did not get
around to building any terminals to im-
port liquefied natural gas, the most
straightforward short-term replace-
ment for pipeline gas from Russia.
Scholz’s coalition promises to gener-
ate 80 per cent of electricity from
renewables by 2030, and Germany will
be even more dependent on gas as a
“transitional” fuel.
If anything, Johnson’s hypodermic
drip feed remark understated the ex-
tent of the problem.SERGEI KARPUKHIN, CHRIS MCGRATH/GETTY IMAGES; YURI KOCHETKOV/EPA; ALEXEI NIKOLSKY/KREMLINRUSSIAUKGERMANYYamal-
EuropeBrotherhoodUKRAINEExisting Russian
gas pipelinesNord
Stream 2Nord
Stream 1Oliver Moody Berlin6 A German businessman has been
charged with selling €1 million worth of
“dual-use” goods to Russia that could
be used to make chemical weapons and
nuclear missiles.
The man from Saxony, known only
as Alexander S, is accused of violating
sanctions and was arrested in May last
Kyiv, pro-Europe protesters gathered, while Russian tanks waited on the border year. A trial date has not yet been set.