br23 blog - minsk, belarus

Toronto Star published a brilliant commentary about Vladimir Putin’s best friend Gerhard Schroeder:

It’s one thing for a legislator to resign his job, leave his committee chairmanship and go to work for a company over whose industry he once had jurisdiction. It’s quite another thing when the chancellor of Germany leaves his job and goes to work for a company controlled by the Russian government that is helping to build a Baltic Sea gas pipeline that he championed while in office.

To make the decision even more unpalatable, it turns out that the chief executive of the pipeline consortium is a former East German secret police officer who was friendly with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, back when Putin was a KGB agent in East Germany. If nothing else, Schroeder deserves opprobrium for his bad taste.

But the announcement should also raise questions about the real reasons why Schroeder was so keen to see this pipeline project launched. The pipeline has cost Germany diplomatically by infuriating its Central European and Baltic neighbours. Russia chose to use the sea route rather than run a new pipeline alongside one that already exists on land, despite the far greater expense. The only possible reason was political: The Baltic Sea pipeline could allow Russia to cut off gas to Central Europe [also Ukraine and Belarus] and the Baltic states while still delivering gas to Germany. Many have wondered why Germany chose to go along with this project. Could it have been because the former chancellor realized that he was, in effect, creating his own future place of employment?

On a broader level, Schroeder’s decision to swap his job with the German government for a job funded by the Russian government should raise questions for German voters about their country’s relationship with Russia. During his seven years as chancellor, Schroeder went out of his way to ignore the gradual suppression of political rights in Russia and to play down the significance of Russia’s horrific war in Chechnya. He thwarted attempts to put unified Western pressure on Russia to change its behaviour. We can only hope that Germany’s new chancellor, Angela Merkel, uses this extraordinary announcement as a reason to launch a new German policy toward Russia, one based on something other than Schroeder’s private interests.

Also “Financial Times” has an interesting article about that:

• Moscow seeks to use petro-power as political tool

After spending the past year bringing key oil and gas assets back under state control, a string of events have shown how Russia is using its petro-power. Gazprom, the state-controlled gas giant, is demanding that former Soviet states, which since the USSR collapsed in 1991 have enjoyed subsidised prices for Russian gas, finally move to market rates.

But it is doing so in a highly differentiated way. Ukraine, having shifted out of Moscow’s orbit since last year’s Orange Revolution, has been slapped with the biggest demand for a price increase. Prices charged to Georgia and Moldova, which have also turned their gaze westwards, have nearly doubled. Yet Belarus, loyal to Moscow, is still getting gas at the old price.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 24th, 2005 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Deutschland, Ukraine, Europe, Belarus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.