According to the German Welt and the British The Times, the German social-democratic regional state leader Manuela Schwesig has promoted the interests of the Russian gas supplier “Gazprom” in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern region. Located in northern Germany, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is the now-canceled Nord Stream 2’s entry point.
It is also home to a sham ecological fund that Schwesig, who has been called a “Putin’s puppet” who “turned her office into a branch of Gazprom,” has allegedly helped create in 2021 to lobby Gazprom’s interests on the federal and European level. In it, they brainstormed how to use their status to evade US sanctions while its other goals were to whitewash the pipeline’s reputation and establish ways of circumventing American sanctions.
The documents obtained by the newspapers also suggest Schwesig participated in Nord Stream 2 AG’s hiring decisions. The company owned by Gazprom is headed by a former Stasi agent who befriended Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in the 1980s.
Norbert Röttgen, a member of the Christian Democratic Union has called for Schwesig to resign for “colluding with a Russian company and deliberately misleading the public”.
Notably, former Chancellor Angela Merkel, who served as a member of the Bundestag for the same land between 1990 and 2021, was the chief advocate of the contentious pipeline.
Despite multiple warnings issued by other countries, including Ukraine, that Moscow is using the pipeline as geopolitical leverage., together with other notable figures such as the Former Minister of Foreign Affairs Frank-Walter Steinmeier, she persistently insisted on the Nord Stream 2’s completion. The project received the green light in the summer of 2021.
Following Putin’s decision to recognize the independence of the rogue republics in eastern Ukraine in February 2022, just several days before he declared war on Ukraine, the project was put on indefinite hold.
