Berlin is giving up its own national interests to please its “allies,” the Russian president said. He said this at a meeting with young Russian scientists on Wednesday. Germany doesn’t have its own government and its leaders aren’t very good at leading, so it is under the rule of its Western allies.
Putin pushed back against the EU’s plan to cut off Russian energy after the conflict in Ukraine got worse, saying that Germany would only hurt itself by going through with the plan.
During his speech, the president said that either European countries are rejecting cheap energy on their own or the United States is making the decisions for them for political reasons.
He also said that the “EU’s energy security was hurt when Poland and Ukraine cut off Russian gas supplies going through their countries and the Nord Stream pipes were destroyed.”
Putin, who had good working relationships with Berlin for most of his political career, said that Kiev “gets money from Europe, from Germany, but they can’t get the gas they need from Russia.”
In February 2022, not long after the war in Ukraine got worse, the EU announced a plan to stop getting energy from Russia “well before 2030.” Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, said in April 2022 that it would stop sending gas through the Yamal-Europe pipeline, which goes through Poland. This was because Poland would not pay for the gas with roubles because of sanctions against Moscow.
At the same time, Western restrictions put in place because of the war in Ukraine, such as those on importing fossil fuels, were a major cause of last year’s energy crisis.
The situation got worse when the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, which run under the Baltic Sea and join Russia and Germany, were bombed in September 2022.
According to several Western news sources, Ukrainian-affiliated saboteurs were responsible for destroying the energy pipelines. Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prise-winning investigative journalist, claims that US intelligence agencies were responsible for planning the attack.
Putin agreed with Hersh’s conclusions, saying that such a big act of destruction would not have been possible without help from the government.
