BRUSSELS — Russia’s violent closure of the Kerch Strait, the sole shipping lane to a major Ukrainian port city, is undermining German support for Russia’s proposed natural gas pipeline to western Europe, according to the State Department.
“When you have a naked act of aggression like that, I think it resonates in German public opinion,” a senior State Department official told reporters after a meeting of NATO’s council on Black Sea security. “We’ve seen some indications in our recent conversations with German officials that they’ve absorbed that message more plainly after Kerch.”
U.S. officials have been lobbying Germany not to proceed with the development of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a natural gas pipeline that would circumvent Ukraine and thereby allow Russia to sell gas to western Europe without paying transit fees to its former vassal state.
“It’s harder for them to just say this is a commercial project,” the senior State Department official said.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government has rejected the U.S. before when it raised the pipeline, but U.S. officials are renewing their criticism in the wake of Russia’s decision to seize three Ukrainian naval vessels and about two dozen sailors — the first direct and open clash between Russia and Ukraine since Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
“There are practical, energy-related reasons we don’t want Nord Stream 2 to go forward; there are also security and Ukraine-related reasons we don’t want Nord Stream 2 to go forward,” the official said during the briefing, which took place on condition of anonymity. “And, this is a startling reminder.”
Merkel, who has relinquished leadership of her party and is preparing to step down as chancellor in 2021, has been a staunch defender of the European Union’s political interests throughout her tenure. Still, her government has opposed many of the United States’ efforts to constrain Russia’s energy sector, even in response to the Kremlin’s aggression against the West.
Then-German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel argued last year that the U.S. is trying to block Russian energy exports in order to boost American companies’ sales.
“Sanctions policies are neither a suitable nor an appropriate instrument for promoting national export interests and the domestic energy sector,” Gabriel said in July 2017.
Merkel’s likeliest replacements as the leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union party have issued varying degrees of concern about the pipeline in recent days.
“We have to acknowledge that the hard point has not been reached, otherwise Putin would not have taken this path,” Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said, per Channel News Asia, while saying a cancellation of the pipeline is “too radical” a move.
One of Kramp-Karrenbauer’s strongest potential rivals, Friedrich Merz, took a more aggressive tone.
“The more the conflict escalates, the more it raises the question: Is it really the right thing that we build this pipeline?” Merz noted.
