When President Trump called Germany a “captive of Russia” Wednesday at the NATO summit in Brussels, it sounded like a vindication for all of us in the region.
As the president of the former Soviet republic of Georgia from 2004-2013, and the governor of the Odessa region in Ukraine from 2015 to 2016, I speak for many in Ukraine and Georgia — two countries on the front lines of the Russian threat — in saying that we have long felt a deep unease with Russian-German energy deals like the natural gas pipeline Nord Stream 2. Indeed, the implications of this pipeline pose an existential threat to the independence and security of American allies in Eastern Europe.
My first official visit as President of Georgia was to Germany in 2004, where I spoke with Chancellor Gerhard Schroder. As a newcomer to politics, I was elated to meet the leader of a major Western power and have a candid discussion on regional issues. In the course of our conversation, I mentioned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s increasingly assertive policies in the former Soviet region. To my amazement, the Russian ambassador to Georgia showed up at my office a few days later and produced an accurate readout of my meeting with Chancellor Schroder — accompanied by a message from Putin, that he was unhappy with me complaining to the West about Russian foreign policy.
I later found that the chancellor had been concerned, in the aftermath of our official meeting, that the points I brought up might create tension in the very comfortable relationship Germany enjoyed with Russia. The German side had shared these concerns with Russian officials, hence the visit from the Russian ambassador. When Schroder left office several years later, he became the director of a subsidiary of Gazprom, the Russian energy firm inextricably connected to the Kremlin. President Trump alluded to this in his remarks at NATO yesterday.
Since Schroder dissipated into the Russian bureaucracy, Chancellor Angela Merkel has taken a harder line on Russia—at least in rhetoric. Moreover, Germany’s support of the sanctions on Russia following the annexation of Crimea in 2014 has been instrumental in standing up to Putin’s revanchist policies. But, as Trump pointed out yesterday, Germany is playing both sides. At the NATO Bucharest Summit in 2008, Chancellor Merkel decisively blocked the Membership Action Plan for Georgia, the largest per-capita contributor of troops to the NATO mission in Afghanistan.
In doing so, Germany undermined the strategic decision of the U.S. to expand NATO in Eastern Europe—despite the fact that, as President Trump correctly asserted, U.S. contributions to NATO are higher than Germany’s by an order of magnitude. Moreover, I believe Germany’s refusal to offer a NATO Membership Action Plan to Georgia emboldened Russia to invade my country in August 2008.
After the invasion — and the occupation of my country by Russia, which persists to this day — Germany was instrumental in creating the EU-backed Tagliavini Commission, which somehow divided blame for the war between Georgia and Russia — and offered a pretext for the West to re-engage with Russia economically and diplomatically.
What’s more, to this day, Germany has consistently served the interests of the Kremlin by blocking sales of lethal defensive weapons to Georgia. By contrast, President Trump’s administration authorized the sale of air defense and anti-tank weaponry to American allies in Eastern Europe, including Georgia and Ukraine. (It is worth noting that this was a reversal of former President Barack Obama’s policy: Though he expressed concerns about Russian aggression in Georgia and Ukraine, Obama refused to authorize U.S. weapon sales to these U.S. allies, for fear of antagonizing Russia.)
Thus, the Germans and their allies in Europe are being rather disingenuous when they voice concerns about under-the-table cooperation between President Trump and President Putin — especially in the run-up to the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki next week. There is no evidence Trump has collaborated with Putin to weaken European security; by contrast, there are many examples of that exact scenario in Germany, France, Italy, and several other European states.
For these reasons, America’s Eastern European allies count on President Trump to raise with Putin not only the issue of Ukraine, but the continued occupation of one-fifth of Georgia’s territory by Russian troops. This will, one more time, make a point that is often overlooked in American media — that many in our neighborhood see the U.S. as the main defender of freedom, in the age of sellouts and back-door deals.
Mikheil Saakashvili was president of Georgia from 2004 to 2013. He is also a Ukrainian politician and head of the Movement of New Forces party.
