GERMAN chancellor Angela Merkel’s hosting of Russian President Vladimir Putin at her official retreat outside Berlin was important for two reasons. The first lies in the very meeting itself, which served to end Putin’s US-led international isolation. Though they met briefly at Sochi last year this was their first bilateral encounter since 2014 when Merkel protested at the seizure of Crimea. A key part of these talks was the completion of the North Stream 2 pipeline which will double the amount of gas that Russia can export to Europe. Germany, busy abandoning its nuclear power generation, will be a prime customer for this fresh supply for its conventional power generation.
However, Washington has long opposed the pipeline and Trump has even said it will make Germany “captive to Russia”. Since 2012 Russia has already been delivering 55 billion cubic meters of gas through the existing Baltic pipeline, at 1,222 kilometers, the world’s longest. Russian gas is also piped through Ukraine. Repeated disputes between Moscow and Kiev over payment for the gas that Ukraine takes from the line have caused the Russians to close down the whole supply, thus cutting off power stations in Western Europe. Nord Stream 2 will double the capacity of the existing Baltic pipeline by 2019.
Among other factors, US strategists fear that Ukraine will be in danger of being isolated and forced back into the Russian sphere of influence. Despite the EU’s past courting of Kiev, which alarmed the Kremlin by going so far as contemplating EU membership which might have led to Ukraine becoming part of the NATO military alliance, Merkel seems content to allow the economic advantages of a substantially increased energy supply to outweigh the political defense of Kiev.
Her weekend Berlin meeting with Putin also served to reassert her effective leadership of the EU and at the same time enrage President Trump with whom she is on the very worst of terms.
The second reason her Putin talks were important was the fate of Syrian refugees. The Russian president made clear before the meeting that he wanted all who had fled the Assad regime to be helped to go home. In particular, he specifically said that Germany could not afford a second asylum crisis. Merkel must have ground her teeth as she heard this. From the outset, her humane policy to admit up to a million Syrian asylum seekers was based on her clear appreciation that the Assad regime was intent on butchering all opposition. Putin also mentioned the three million refugees in Turkey and the one million each in Jordan and Lebanon. He warned that these people should not become a “potential” burden for the EU.
Merkel’s aides were quick to point out that an early return of Syrian refugees sheltering in Germany was unlikely. The chancellor did not however spell out the probable fate of many of these unfortunates if they returned to the clutches of the Assad dictatorship.
But the Germans did not pick up the implicit threat in Putin’s use of the word “potential”. Is he perhaps suggesting that his good friend Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan should welsh on his $3.5 billion deal to keep refugees out of the EU? Was this what he meant when he said that Germany, for which read the politically-beleaguered Merkel, “could not afford another refugee crisis”?
