April 1, 2025 - 1:00pm
Well, that didn’t take long. Peace negotiations over an end to the war in Ukraine are barely underway, and senior German politicians are already calling for their country to resume its ties to Russia.
The next German government is set to contain fewer people who have a problem with that, and the lure of a return to cheap energy is great. Is Germany on the brink of reverting to its pre-war relationship with Moscow?
Michael Kretschmer, a deputy chairman of Friedrich Merz’s centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU), is just the latest politician to moot the idea of an end to sanctions. Arguing that European sanctions against Russia are “completely out of date”, and out of sync with “what the Americans are doing”, he has demanded “constant discussion over which of the sanctions are perhaps more to our detriment than they have an impact in Russia”.
Kretschmer is not the only one to voice such views now. CDU MP Thomas Bareiß floated the idea of restoring energy deliveries through the Nord Stream pipelines once the situation in Ukraine settles. “Of course, gas can flow again,” he argued, and “relationships will normalise.” His party colleague Jan Heinisch agreed in an interview with Politico earlier this month that Germany “should also be able to discuss purchasing Russian gas again”.
This is not a line of argument that comes solely out of the CDU. The Social Democrats (SPD) of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who are likely to be the Christian Democrats’ coalition partner, also have many supporters of a resumption of ties with Russia. Dietmar Woidke, head of the state of Brandenburg, has said that he’d be happy “if we could return to normal economic relations with Russia”. This is hardly surprising as his state contains the Schwedt oil refinery, which was once majority Russian-owned and provided most of the fuel used in Berlin. It’s a major employer in the region.
In the past, Merz has presented himself as a hawkish supporter of Ukraine. Before the election earlier this year, he’d promised to send Kyiv long-range Taurus missiles, something that Scholz had refused to do. He’d also criticised the Chancellor for his telephone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin last year. A huge spending package he’s just pushed through the German parliament was supposed to boost the country’s deterrence value, specifically against the threat from Russia. Moscow seems to believe Merz, with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov calling him “pretty aggressive”.
While Merz may not belong to the pro-Russia camp of his party, it’s telling that he has so far made little attempt to silence it either. On the contrary, many of its most vocal proponents are sitting at the negotiating table which hammers out the conditions for the next coalition. Kretschmer is in the senior negotiating group alongside Merz. Bareiß sits in a subgroup on infrastructure (much of which Germany had to wrestle out of Russian control when the war began), and Heinisch is a member of the all-important energy group.
Russian energy has been so central to the German economic model that it has also seeped into the country’s political DNA. Merz won’t be able to eliminate this tendency in the short term, but he must ensure that Berlin doesn’t return to business as usual with Moscow the moment there is an opportunity. Germany needs to diversify its energy sources to keep itself independent of the whims of foreign powers.
Unfortunately, there is little evidence so far that Merz is exercising any leadership in this matter. Negotiations over the exact policies of the next coalition are not yet complete, but the results so far do not indicate a coherent strategy to solve Germany’s energy crisis. Before the war, Russia supplied a third of Germany’s oil, half of its coal imports and over half of its gas. With the exception of an extension of the country’s exit from coal from 2030 to 2038, there appears to be no plan as to how to replace the other fossil fuel imports. The CDU would like to bring nuclear energy back, but the SPD would not.
With the Greens — who were the most hawkish about Moscow while in government — now in opposition, Germany’s next ruling coalition may well find that its lowest common denominator is a return to Russian fossil fuels.
Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and writer. She is the author, most recently, of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990.
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SubscribeGiven that nuclear power is dirty, expensive and far too dangerous and that Germany (as far as I know) does not have oil and gas, I’m not sure it has much of a choice. One of the many lessons of the Ukraine War for Germany is to make sure such a disaster never happens again.
To the extent that there was a “disaster”, it was Germany relying on Russia for gas.
German return to ostpolitik was inevitable. Poland and Ukraine apoplectic
If they rebuild Nordstream, my guess it will blow up like it did last time.
The Greens prevented the prisoner exchange with Navalny, insisted on destroying the nuclear power plants, not caring that the alternative was the fantastically polluting lignite mines, which were opened up again. How nice that they are hawkish.
Lignite is very useful stuff. It can be burned to produce electricity.
Sanctions haven’t worked, and have damaged the West more than Russia. This is quite common. The US’s sanctions against Japan provoked Pearl Harbour. Sanctions against Iraq did…nothing at all, except mean that Iran could rest easy . Future historians will marvel at the favouritism shown to undemocratic Arab monarchies, and the harshness to secular Arab states.
I’m sure the sanctions could be made a lot harsher if the West has the fortitude to do so.
Now I’m really confused. I have spent months reading Unherd columnists and a third of the commentors saying that Russia is a dangerous empire, slavering over war with more European countries.
But now I read that important German politicians are serious about re-doing business with the Russians. How can that be? Don’t they know that Putin is itching to conquer Germany? Can both be true?
The first paragraph is true. To the extent that the first sentence of the second paragraph is true, it is because those politicians are idiots.
Here is an absurdity of our times: Germany turned tricks with Russia for decades, empowering Putin’s ambitions and indifferent to his intentions on Ukraine. No European country did more to abet Putin’s imperial ambitions than Germany. And yet it has not been called to account and is likely to resume its prostitution post Ukraine. Trump comes along and merely utters a few indiscretions regarding Ukraine while working to end the war and is held up as a monster for so doing, despite his having been the US president who armed Ukraine pre-2022.
We know Moscow is a rancid government. But if these past three tragic years in Ukraine has shown us, it’s also not the existential threat to Europe that it was made out to be.
If indeed Europe is going to rearm and take on its own security, it’s going to need lots of energy, and that means for now, cheap Russian gas and oil.
“The West,” and certainly my own country, the United States, has done business with far worse characters. Why would we want to lock them out of any Western economic relationships and push them further into the embrace and control of China?
Maybe it’s a sell-out to a bad guy, or maybe it’s just a matter of being realistic in realizing that Germany needs energy, and to quote the Godfather, that it’s better to keep one’s enemies close.
“But if these past three tragic years in Ukraine has shown us, it’s also not the existential threat to Europe that it was made out to be“. That is true, but only because of the abject corruption that pervades every aspect of Russia, including its military. The Russians might not currently have the means to invade Western Europe, but they have the desire.
Germany needs cheap Russian Gas … don’t antagonise them and they won’t antagonise us … we really shouldn’t be fighting. Russia is not our enemy.
Ukraine would be intact and fully functioning today if we didn’t try to use it as a launchpad to destabilise and antagonise Russia.
A million plus dead. Millions of lives destroyed, hundreds of billions spent AND we lost. This should be the last western military adventure for a while. We need to have a little think about what we’re aiming at and why.
National sovereignty. Pretty straightforward.
Not a concept recognised by the West…Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria…
Russia has only been applying the “rules” created by Western precedent.
Well, the idea was to weaken Germany industrially.
Lets hope so. Peaceful trade would be great
Am worried the uk and france want to push the war onwards due to economic stresses at home.
Peace would be great, but unfortunately the Russians are complete barbarians who aren’t even remotely interested in it.
Oh look, the Germans are finally coming to the conclusion that cutting off your nose to spite your face isn’t a realistic economic strategy.
That’s an interesting way of putting it. “Which Germany stole from Russia” would be more honest and factual>
Putin, the ayatollahs, Xi and Trump are all very different in many ways, but with one common factor: each is a highly accomplished bully. Germany is at one with most of Europe and UK in thinking that bullies can be bought off. They can’t.
So, no different from the EU…
Angela Merkel is back in power.