SPD Federal Party Congress Berlin, 10.-12. December 2015, CityCube, Messe Berlin
Photo of Olaf Kosinski
According to Deutsche Welt and the British Times, the German Social Democratic state chairwoman Manuela Schwesig has campaigned for the interests of the Russian gas supplier “Gazprom” in the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania region. Mecklenburg-West Pomerania is in northern Germany and is the entry point of the now abandoned Nord Stream 2.
It also houses a sham eco-fund that Schwesig, who has been dubbed “Putin’s puppet” and “turned her office into a branch of Gazprom,” allegedly co-founded in 2021 to represent Gazprom’s interests at the federal and European levels. In it she brainstorming how to use their status to evade US sanctions, while their other goals were to gloss over the pipeline’s reputation and find ways to circumvent US sanctions.
The documents available to the newspapers also indicate that Schwesig was involved in the hiring decisions of Nord Stream 2 AG. Gazprom’s company is run by a former Stasi agent who became friends with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the 1980s.
Norbert Röttgen, member of the Christian Democratic Union, calls for Schwesig to resign because of “collaboration with a Russian company and intentional misleading of the public”.
Notably, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who served as the Bundestag deputy for the same country between 1990 and 2021, was the main proponent of the controversial pipeline.
Despite multiple warnings from other countries, including Ukraine, that Moscow is using the pipeline as a geopolitical bargaining chip, it, along with other notable figures such as former Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, has been adamant that Nord Stream 2 should be completed. The project was given the green light in the summer 2021
Following Putin’s decision to recognize the independence of the rogue republics in eastern Ukraine in February 2022, just days before he declared war on Ukraine, the project was indefinitely suspended.
