Germany’s tangled relationship with Russia

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There are few cringier moments in the recent history of German diplomacy than the time Sigmar Gabriel asked Vladimir Putin for his autograph.

The then German economy minister was conveying a special request from “Oksana”, a woman with Russian roots who worked in his wife’s dental practice. Putin obliged and a grateful Gabriel took home a photo inscribed with the words: “Oksana, all the best.”

It was October 2015, a year after Russia had annexed Crimea and fomented war in eastern Ukraine. None of that stopped Gabriel, though, who fawningly thanked Putin for taking time out of his busy schedule. He had, after all, “so much to do, what with the conflict in Syria”.

The incident is recounted in Die Moskau Connection — “The Moscow Connection” — a new book about Germany’s tangled relationship with Russia by Reinhard Bingener and Markus Wehner, two reporters with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Meticulously researched and engagingly written, it amounts to a damning indictment of Gerhard Schröder, former chancellor, Kremlin lobbyist and close friend of Putin, as well as the circle of Social Democrat politicians around him — men like Gabriel and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the former foreign minister and current federal president — and their all-too-trusting, all-too-indulgent approach to Russia.

The authors set themselves the task of explaining how Germany ended up so dependent on Russian gas and how German politicians could have been so naive about the tyrannical, neo-imperialist system Putin was creating. Taken together, they consider this “the biggest mistake in German foreign policy in the country’s postwar history”. It’s a somewhat hyperbolic claim, but you can see what they mean.

Much inevitably hinges on Schröder’s role and his preternaturally close relationship to Putin. The authors write how the Russian president used his KGB training to “recruit” Schröder as a kind of Russian agent of influence. There is a hilarious description of him rocking up at Schröder’s 60th birthday party in Hanover in 2004 with a 40-man Cossack choir that serenaded the chancellor with the “Niedersachsenlied”, a kind of local anthem. The wooing paid off: shortly after stepping down as chancellor in 2005, Schröder became chair of Nord Stream AG and in effect Gazprom’s man in Germany, an appointment that left an indelible stain on German politics.

But Schröder’s role is well-rehearsed, and his status as Germany’s Putin apologist-in-chief firmly established in the German consciousness. Where Bingener and Wehner’s book proves revelatory is in its assessment of Gabriel and Steinmeier. As two of Germany’s most powerful politicians over the past decade they clung to an outdated policy of friendship towards Russia, fuelled by nostalgia for former chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik of the 1960s and 1970s. They drove one of the most fateful and misguided infrastructure projects the country has ever embarked upon — the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, a venture that was from the start designed to tighten Russia’s grip on European energy markets.

Steinmeier’s pursuit of a “modernisation partnership” with Russia, his blinkered policy of “convergence through interdependence”, comes in for particular criticism. It is remarkable that as late as 2013, two years after Putin had suppressed widespread protests against rigged parliamentary elections, Steinmeier could conjure a “common future” with a Russia linked to the west through “shared fundamental beliefs”.

Few interviews have aged as badly as the one Steinmeier gave in 2016 during Nato manoeuvres in Poland and the Baltics, when he condemned western “sabre-rattling” and “shrill cries of war”. “Whoever thinks you get more security through symbolic parades of tanks on the alliance’s eastern border is making a mistake,” he said.

But the authors are especially scathing about Gabriel, who called for sanctions against Moscow to be lifted and consistently dismissed fears of Germany’s growing reliance on Russia for energy. Before he became energy minister, about 35 per cent of Germany’s imported gas came from Russia: by 2018, that share had risen to 55 per cent. Also on his watch, Germany sold some of its most strategic gas storage facilities to Gazprom — a decision that would have fateful consequences during the energy crisis that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Few come out of this book smelling of roses. Angela Merkel, German chancellor from 2005 to 2021, is faulted for pulling her punches with Putin and supporting Nord Stream 2 to the hilt. The real heroes, though they rarely get a mention, are the German Greens, who opposed the pipeline from the start. The authors also acknowledge the role of Olaf Scholz in steering the SPD towards a more sceptical view of Russia. He, at least, was on the right side of history.

But it is the triumvirate of Schröder, Steinmeier and Gabriel who are the unquestioned villains of the piece. “From the start”, the three of them “misjudged, played down and at times even denied Russia’s steadily growing aggression towards the west and Germany”. “Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, the murders [of Putin’s political opponents] — there were plenty of warning signs.”

It is a devastating conclusion, one that could end up casting a long shadow over the three men’s reputation in their homeland, while also shaping history’s verdict on the SPD and its Ostpolitik.

Die Moskau Connection: das Schröder-Netzwerk und Deutschlands Weg in die Abhängigkeit by Reinhard Bingener and Markus Wehner, CH Beck, €18, 320 pages

Guy Chazan is the FT’s Berlin bureau chief