Germany Aims to Guide the West’s Ties to Russia

MOSCOW — In the heat of the Georgia crisis in August, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany flew to Russia to warn about the consequences of renewed militarism. Two days later she was in Georgia, voicing support for the country’s eventual entry into NATO.
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Misha Japaridze/Associated Press
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany with President Dimitri A. Medvedev of Russia.
Autumn crept in and passions cooled. The beginning of October found Mrs. Merkel back in Russia, looking on as the German utility E.ON and the Russian state energy giant Gazprom signed a significant deal in St. Petersburg, giving the German firm a stake in the enormous Yuzhno-Russkoye natural gas field in Siberia.
Mrs. Merkel’s shifting focus served as a reminder of the pivotal role played by Germany in shaping the West’s relationship with Russia. It is Russia’s largest trading partner, Europe’s single biggest economy and one of America’s closest allies. Moscow’s aggressive posture has not only thrust Russia, a nuclear-armed energy power, back to the geopolitical spotlight. It has also dragged Germany there with it.
Just as the United States is struggling to redefine its relationship with a resurgent and at times antagonistic government in Moscow, Germany is scrambling to protect the close commercial, cultural and diplomatic ties with Russia it has forged since the end of the cold war — and, in some areas, long before.
How broad that divide has grown will become clearer this week, when NATO foreign ministers gather in Brussels. Berlin and Washington are at odds over how to deal with NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine — a tussle that at its heart is about how to deal with Russia.
As the United States aims mainly to counter Russia’s newfound military assertiveness, Germany favors steps to develop Russia economically and ensure its political stability. Germany sees its responsibility to guide Russia, not contain it.
The incoming Obama administration, which has vowed to pursue a new path to curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions as well as achieving other foreign policy goals that involve Russia, may find that one road to Moscow runs through Berlin. At a minimum, it seems likely to have to address Germany’s deeper interests in Russia.
“There are serious disagreements between Washington and Berlin from which Moscow can only benefit if there is not better coordination,” said Angela Stent, who served as the top Russia officer at the United States government’s National Intelligence Council from 2004 to 2006 and now directs Russian studies at Georgetown University. “The Obama administration should work with the Germans as it reassesses U.S. policy toward Russia.”
Weary of American lectures about the fact that 36 percent of the natural gas that heats German homes comes from Russia, some German politicians wonder how Americans can worry more about this energy dependence than they themselves do.
“Many Germans believe Bush only invaded Iraq for oil, and many Americans believe Germany’s Russia policy is determined by gas,” said Karsten D. Voigt, who coordinates German-American relations in the German Foreign Ministry and who for years ran the German-Russian parliamentary group in the German Parliament. “Every German government since at least the 1970s has tried to bind Russia, and before that the Soviet Union, more closely with Europe.”
Sergei Kupriyanov, a representative of Gazprom, said, “Our cooperation began during the cold war,” referring to deals — opposed by the United States — that laid gas pipelines between Russia and Germany in the 1970s. “The Berlin Wall still existed,” he said. “Compared to what we had then, Georgia is just peanuts.”
Germans see not dependence on Russia, but interdependence. The European Union’s 27 nations account for 80 percent of the cumulative foreign investment in Russia, a fact starkly exposed — if the Kremlin ever forgot — by the flight of capital after the Georgia crisis.
The Europeans, after Georgia, angrily froze negotiations with Russia over a new partnership agreement. Barely 10 weeks later, they decided to resume the talks. “We cannot build a European architecture against Russia or without Russia, only with Russia,” said Alexander Rahr, director of the Russian/Eurasian program at the German Council on Foreign Relations.
While Germany needs Russia’s raw materials and covets the significant market there for its precision machine tools, Russia is equally dependent on European investment to diversify its economy, a fact driven home all too clearly for Russians now that the financial crisis has sent energy prices plunging.
In the city of Yaroslavl, an automotive company, the GAZ Group, still makes diesel truck engines in a factory first built in the waning days of czarist rule in 1916. The production model evokes Soviet times, starting with iron in the foundry on the site, with workers building almost the entire engine from scratch.
A short drive away, past clusters of birch trees, is a field of concrete, metal trusses and corrugated iron roofing. It is the beginning of a state-of-the-art production plant for the company’s new engine model, a project valued at $442 million.
The plant sits a few hours north of Moscow by car, but the names of the suppliers sound like a roll call of German industry, with most of the new machinery and production lines supplied by German companies like Grob-Werke and ThyssenKrupp Krause.
“Germany is, in terms of technology, expertise and know how in the automotive industry, I think the best in the world,” said Ruslan Grekov, the project director for the new engine in Yaroslavl. “Of course, Germany is different from Russia. The difference is good.”
Such sentiments might seem surprising, even jarring, in a country where, in Soviet times, Nazis were vilified in a daily diet of war movies.
But the bonds between Europe’s two largest countries were forged over centuries, as German nobles like Catherine the Great became Russian royalty and German generals led the czar’s armies. German craftsmen worked in Moscow while German farmers settled near the Volga River.
The relationship has been tempered on the German side with guilt over World War II and gratitude over German reunification.
But always the anchor has been business, with Germany’s technical skill complementing Russia’s vast resources. The German conglomerate Siemens laid the Russian state telegraph network in the 1850s. Stalin built Soviet industrial might in his first Five-Year Plan in large part with German machines.
The current global slowdown has sent ripples of fear across Russia about a possible repeat of the 1998 collapse of the ruble. The World Bank halved its expectation for Russian growth next year, but it was still 3 percent, whereas the German economy, already in recession, is expected to contract, making Russia all the more important as layoffs in Germany mount.
Trade between Russia and Germany grew 25 percent to $49.3 billion in the first half of the year. Russia is one of Germany’s fastest-growing markets. Last year, German exports to Russia totaled $36 billion, more than five times the $6.7 billion exported from the United States to Russia.
German businessmen not only work out of sales offices in Moscow or invest in the country’s rich oil and gas fields. They are all over — from Siberia to Yekaterinburg to St. Petersburg, with some 4,600 companies in all investing $13.2 billion, building factories and delivering machinery to Russians who aspire to be more than the raw-goods store for European neighbors.
Today, Siemens is supplying Russia with its first high-speed trains, known as the Velaro RUS. The contract is worth $758 million for Siemens, half for the trains and half for servicing.
The oligarch Roman Abramovich’s construction firm Infrastruktura announced this year that it had ordered the world’s largest drill from the German company Herrenknecht to bore tunnels in Moscow and near Sochi in preparation for the 2014 Winter Olympics.
Igor Yurgens, executive board chairman at the Institute of Contemporary Development in Moscow, of which President Dimitri A. Medvedev is board chairman, said Germany was a strategic partner and the most patient investor in Russia’s future.
“We do not have laws in this country, but we have a lot of friendships, and friendship is more important than laws,” Mr. Yurgens said, in an interview in his Moscow office just off the city’s Garden Ring Road, where sputtering old Ladas inch through jams alongside late-model Mercedes sedans. “That’s historically so. And with Germans, this is the case.”
“On the background of this economic very strong cooperation and involvement, their criticism is taken a bit more lightly than the criticism of some others who do nothing at all, but just keep criticizing,” Mr. Yurgens added.
When Mr. Medvedev threatened after the American election to place new missiles in Kaliningrad, the location was a symbol of the painful, complex relationship between Russia and Germany. That island of Russian territory — awkwardly perched between the NATO members Poland and Lithuania — was the German city of Königsberg before it fell to the Soviets in the wake of World War II.
Yet in a sign of the opportunities presented by the Russian-German-American triangle, it was Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, from the usually Russia-friendly Social Democrats, who issued perhaps the sternest rebuff to Mr. Medvedev. It was “the wrong signal at the wrong time,” Mr. Steinmeier said the next day.
The incoming Obama administration, German officials say quietly, should take note. As indicated by Mr. Medvedev’s backpedaling since, the Russians apparently did.