For years Angela Merkel has resisted entreaties to ditch Nord Stream 2. Could that change?
and his officials refuse to utter the name of Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s leading opponent, in public. But in Berlin, where Mr Navalny has been recuperating in hospital since his poisoning in Siberia on August 20th, he is the talk of the town. Mercifully, on September 7th he emerged from a medically induced coma. German doctors caution that it is too early to assess the long-term damage to his health. The harm to Germany’s relations with Russia, though, is already clear.
Few global leaders have known each other as long as Mr Putin, inaugurated in 2000, and Angela Merkel, who took office as Germany’s chancellor five years later. At moments of crisis they have spoken daily. But familiarity has bred a certain contempt. In 2014, fed up with Mr Putin’s lies over Ukraine, the chancellor press-ganged the rest of theinto imposing economic sanctions on Russia. Defying expectations, and a good chunk of Germany’s business lobby, they have held ever since.
Mrs Merkel’s response to the attack on Mr Navalny, including demands for a thorough Russian investigation, has been uncharacteristically assertive. The poisoning has thinned the ranks of Germany’s habitual Putin-level, the default mode for German foreign policy, “horizontal” sanctions—ie, not aimed at specific countries—based on the poisoners’ violation of chemical-weapons bans are possible. Yet the debate in Germany has focused on Nord Stream 2, an almost completed €9.
Eastern Europeans and Americans detest Nord Stream 2 for, as they see it, handing leverage and cash to the Kremlin and undercutting the transit fees earned by Ukraine from an existing land pipeline. Mrs Merkel, who inherited Nord Stream 2 from Gerhard Schröder, her Putin-predecessor, has confided to her European counterparts that she is no fan of the project.
Now there are signs of a shift. On September 6th Heiko Maas, the foreign minister, said that continued Russian stonewalling over Mr Navalny may “force” Germany to rethink the pipeline deal. Mrs Merkel let it be known via her spokesman that she concurred. This “raises the stakes”, argues Janis Kluge, a Russia-watcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. Although no details have been offered, Mrs Merkel would not have shifted ground without a plan.
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