Chancellor Angela Merkel is under pressure within her own party to drop support for a controversial gas pipeline with Russia after ties point to the Kremlin in poisoning Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny.
Norbert Roettgen, head of the German parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a presidential candidate for Merkel’s Christian Democratic party, said the Nord Stream 2 pipeline should be stopped because completing it would reward rather than punish Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“After the Nawalny poisoning, we need a strong European response, which Putin understands: the EU should jointly decide to stop Nord Stream 2,” he said on Twitter on Thursday. “Diplomatic rituals are no longer enough.”
Merkel said the tests showed “unequivocally” that Navalny was poisoned by a military-grade novichok nerve agent and asked the Russian government for answers. The substance was used in the March 2018 assassination attempt on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and her daughter on British soil, leading to the concerted expulsion of 150 Russian diplomats.
Merkel plans to consult with allies of the European Union and NATO to formulate a response in the coming days, but did not make a proposal.
Alexander Dobrindt, deputy leader of the group and a member of the Bavarian branch of Merkel’s bloc, demanded new EU sanctions against Russia. There will have to be a “common European response to this,” the lawmaker told a press conference on Wednesday, as well as “awkward and serious” discussions between the Russian and German governments.
Before a special laboratory of the German armed forces confirmed Navalny’s poisoning with novichok, the chancellor separated the state of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from the attack on Putin’s critic. The project is a Russian-European economic joint venture and linking it to the Navalny case “is not appropriate,” he said on Friday.
The Nord Stream 2 consortium is led by Gazprom PJSC of Russia. The group, which includes BASF SE’s Wintershall DEA unit and Austrian OMV AG, has invested nearly 8 billion euros ($ 9.5 billion) so far in the 745-mile pipeline. Even before the Navalny poisoning raised tensions with Russia, the project was in limbo amid renewed efforts by US senators to torpedo its completion.
Ralph Brinkhaus, head of the Merkel bloc’s parliamentary caucus, raised questions about whether it will now be possible to continue with Nord Stream 2.
“We will have to see in the next few days what kind of responses we receive and what discussions will take place,” he said. “But this is indeed a very serious case,” Brinkhaus said Wednesday.
After realizing that her statement went against Merkel’s position on Nord Stream, she paddled back saying: “I did not build a direct link between the Navalny case and Nord Stream, but only concerned the general relations between Germany. and Russia and the consequences this could have. ” . “
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