• English Site
• > Under the Scope

German-Russian Relations

A Loveless Berlin-Moscow Romance

By Uwe Klussmann and Matthias Schepp in Moscow

As Russia's Vladimir Putin visits Germany this week, his personal chemistry with German Chancellor Angela Merkel is less than perfect -- despite protestations from diplomats and government spokesmen. But the Russians would actually like to have Putin pal Gerhard Schröder back.

At a meeting of German and Russian state delegations in Siberia last April, Russian President Vladimir Putin invited Angela Merkel to a tête-à-tête in the library of the University of Tomsk. Merkel had just been discussing chemical formulas with the university director. "Hopefully, our chemistry will provide for a good mood," said Putin.

Merkel, a onetime physicist, countered coldly, "That's more complicated than complex molecules." She also spurned the bedroom in the guest residence, once painted blue for ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder but repainted pink for Germany's first female head of state. Merkel spent the night in a hotel, along with all of her ministers and the 20 business leaders travelling with the delegation.

When Putin arrives in Germany on Wednesday, he'll have a second chance to make friends with the chancellor, but the outlook isn't rosy. At the G-8 summit of the world's most powerful industrialized nations last July in St. Petersburg, Merkel reserved her bisous for French President Jacques Chirac and Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi. "Germany is just behaving like a bride who is ever on the lookout for a better groom," says Juli Kvizinsky, the long-time Soviet ambassador in Bonn who has since become deputy chairman of the Russian parliament's foreign relations committee.

The other bridegroom, in Merkel's case, is America.

Remaining skeptical of Moscow

Merkel takes a skeptical view of Putin's new authoritarianism in Russia because she grew up in East Germany. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, she was a physicist at East Berlin's Academy of Sciences, active in the democratic civil rights movement. While she enjoyed her newfound freedom, a dejected Vladimir Putin -- then a Lieutenant Colonel of the KGB, stationed in Dresden -- was busy burning enormous amounts of secret intelligence documents.

For Merkel, the end of the Soviet superpower was a new beginning. For Putin, it was the end. The fact that his visit this week will start in Dresden is an acknowledgement of his relationship to Germany -- Putin speaks fluent German -- but it's not likely to warm Merkel's heart.

She's openly criticized the arrest of Putin's political opponent in Russia, the oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky. It's conceivable that in Dresden she'll also urge Putin, at least privately, to mount a serious investigation into the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya, a Moscow journalist who was critical of the Kremlin. Putin has barely addressed the case in Russia so far, but in Germany he won't be able to escape a number of uncomfortable questions.

The Russo-German love affair, in other words, is over. It reached a high point between Schröder and Putin, but now it's a marriage of convenience. There won't be any divorce, however -- the nations' economies are too intertwined. Germany relies on Russia for much of its oil and natural gas, and German exports to Russia increased last year to €17.3 billion; roughly 4,500 German companies are currently doing business there. Germany's government also provides more bonds for secure exports to Russia than to any other country.

In the nineties, the Russian economic crisis forced presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin to come begging in Germany for financial aid. Those days are over. Now Russian firms and banks go on shopping tours in the West: The Vneshtorgbank acquired shares in the ailing EADS group, for example, and Russia's natural-gas monopoly Gazprom has reportedly just bought a majority interest in a German soccer team (Schalke 04) for €125 million -- the biggest sponsorship deal in the history of German soccer.

The Russian economy has grown this year at a rate of 6.5 percent, and thanks to high energy prices and a moderate fiscal policy, currency reserves have risen to $260 billion. When German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück met with his Russian colleague Alexei Kudrin earlier this year, he smirked, "We have the same numbers." Except that Russia has a budget surplus -- while Germany has run a deficit for years. Which means Merkel can't ignore every overture from Putin, much less make him sleep on the couch.