Putin puts old pals first in New Year

By Rein F. Deer

Date: 12/01/06

Should old acquaintance be forgot," we sang as we saw in New Year 2006. As befits a former KGB agent, Russia's President Vladimir Putin forgets no-one.

He remembered the man who tweaked his nose in the Orange Revolution, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, and switched off the country's gas supplies. On a more genial note, he gave his old pal Matthias Warnig a present, making him general director of the new Russian-German conglomerate to build a pipeline under the Baltic.

Major Warnig, 50, a Stasi officer in the old GDR, and Colonel Putin were colleagues in Dresden in the good old days of the 1980s, and no doubt share Putin's view, expressed last year, that the collapse of the USSR was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century". Still, they are making the best of things. Putin also remembered his more recent acquaintance Gerhard Schröder, who slipped in the Russian-German pipeline agreement during his last days as German chancellor. He got the job of chairman of the supervisory board of the pipeline company, on a (reputed) annual salary of EUR 1 million. As he says, at 61 he is just too young to retire.

The EUR 4 billion gas pipeline from Vyborg to Greifswald, which will take five years to build, profoundly irritates the Poles and Balts, evoking memories of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact. In Estonia there have even been calls for the national border to be moved three nautical miles closer to Finland. Estonia could then potentially have a say in what is coyly known as "the enigmatic project".

Finland has already learned the lesson of all this and is busy constructing the largest nuclear reactor in the world, aiming to reduce its 50% energy dependence on Russia. The palpable connection between energy dependence and politics can be measured by the number of routine violations of Baltic air space by the Russian air-force in drill air attacks.

But the Baltic micro-states should not count on anything more than sympathetic looks across the sea from Finland or Sweden, each of which learned how to cope in its own way. The Finns took on the Russians in the Winter War, on their own. The Swedes, well, they stayed neutral in their Social Democratic heartland.

The streets of Helsinki or Stockholm will not see any demonstrations, 1970s-style, against Putin and friends, though 30 years ago there was great excitement about General Augusto Pinochet, who ran Chile in much the same way as Putin runs Russia today.

Injustice far away is so much easier to cope with.

Comment feature on Russian foreign policy and the project of a gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea, to be built by a Russian-German consortium.