However, Germany has known a different experience. Under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Germany, with the support of Moscow and despite the will of the NATO allies, managed to unite. Helmut Kohl died last Friday. Our Berlin correspondent, Mikhail Antonov, puts this titan's political will into context considering the current problems faced by Germany and Europe.
The new package of US sanctions against Russia could have been considered a general agreement among transatlantic elites to challenge Donald Trump, with the goal of leading him closer to impeachment. But, that would have been the case only if it was clear he wouldn't sign it. There is no such certainty.
Moreover, the US desire to push Russian gas out of the European market and replace it with its own liquefied gas, seems to be consistent with Trump's promise to "make America great again." In this case, it’s planning to do so at the expense of Europe, which will have to pay twice what they do now for energy resources, and which will make its goods too expensive to compete against the US. From the business point of view, the goal is clear, but the methods of achieving it are absolutely not market-based. And, Europe cannot agree to this.
For the first time in the recent history of anti-Russian sanctions, they stand in opposition to Washington. From a joint statement by the German Foreign Minister and the Chancellor of Austria: Political sanctions shouldn’t affect economic interests. And threatening to punish companies from Germany, Austria, and other European countries because they are involved in gas projects with Russia, such as Nord Stream-2, or finance them, brings a completely new and a very negative quality to European-American relations.
All of Gazprom's European partners in the Nord Stream-1 and 2 projects have now been placed under the pressure of sanctions. German company Wintershall and the Austrian concern OMV are among them. It’s fine to hit Russia over the head with sanctions, but no one expected such a cumulative effect. Even Angela Merkel can’t agree this time. I can tell you that Merkel's position fully coincides with the opinion expressed in the statement of the German Foreign Minister and the Austrian Chancellor. It’s difficult to understand that when it comes to punitive measures related to the actions of Russia, for example, in the context of influencing the US election, the European economy becomes the target of the sanctions. It shouldn’t be this way. And it wasn’t like this before.
Siberian gas has been going to Germany and Austria since the mid-1970s. Even at the peak of the Cold War, the Americans didn’t dare to play against the USSR, and threaten the economic interests of Western Europe. On Friday, Helmut Kohl, the "Chancellor of Unification,” the last German leader of the era when the United States still needed allies, passed away. Helmut Kohl was a great German and a great European. He knew that he faced the two greatest tasks of German politics in recent decades: the reunification of our country and the integration of Europe.
Helmut Kohl understood the extent to which these tasks were interrelated. And he achieved these two goals. It might seem that there is something karmic in the fact that Angela Merkel herself has long been moving along the road of disappointment. He called her "my girl", and she turned away from her patron out of high moral considerations, having become the mouthpiece of the in-party opposition during the scandal with shadow funding of the CDU. In the end, this allowed her to take his place in the party and the Bundestag. Kohl never forgave her; he considered her act a betrayal.
Some of his former associates believe that Merkel betrayed his legacy. Helmut Kohl paid special attention to a respectful attitude towards our neighbors, including small European states, advocating equality in negotiations, because Germany, we know this from history, often violated this principle. It would have been impossible under Kohl to build relations with other European states the way Angela Merkel has done. This is the first point. The second point is that we were unbelievably pleased when Kohl led a very open policy towards the Soviet Union and then Russia.
The course which Angela Merkel adheres to today, in negotiations with Russia and President Putin, is the complete opposite. It was a different time, of course, and so were the politicians. These were the people who lived through the war, the Caribbean and Berlin crises, making of them good diplomats and negotiators. I think that politicians who belonged to Kohl’s generation had a better ability to look at the situation through the eyes of the opponent.
Such a policy was conducted in the '90s, during the unifications of Germany and Europe, and during the adoption of the Charter of Paris. The achievements of those years were possible thanks to a constellation of politicians who had the ability to keep each other's interests in mind. Today, it's different. Today, it's the right of the strongest. And Europeans can feel the effect of this on themselves, like never before. The new "greatness of America" Trump speaks of is already clearly more unpleasant than the "American exceptionalism" advocated by Obama.
And then, there are the American senators, who, of course, think Europeans are great, but are ready to sacrifice their interests in the excitement of hunting their president. In the end, if sanctions are formalized into law, and Trump uses this law at least once, Europe will have few ways to demonstrate its own strength. The absolute best way would be to abandon anti-Russian sanctions.
The news of the death of former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl came on Saturday, when the Russian President was watching the victorious match of our national team from the football grandstand. Obviously, sports journalists couldn’t help it, and asked him about Helmut Kohl because for Putin, Kohl was a personal loss. He said that if we wanted to preserve our civilization in this turbulent and rapidly changing world with growing centers of power, and not only military power, but also economic and cultural, then, of course, Europe and Russia should be together. And I fully agree with him. It’s a great pity that he passed away. He visited me not as a chancellor, but simply as a guest. Both in Sochi and Moscow. We had some lengthy private conversations. I was always amazed at his frankness and his depth of ideas, and views on international relations in general and on the relations between Russia and the EU and Russia and Europe in particular. I offer my condolences to the relatives of Helmut Kohl, the German people, and once again I want to emphasize that I very much hope that the idea which he spoke about, and which he formulated, will be implemented in the future.
