EU’s Kallas rejects Gerhard Schröder as Russia-Ukraine negotiator

In a few years, Gas-Gerd is going to be the textbook definition of how to compromise an entire continent’s energy security for a board seat and a paycheck. The man is a walking conflict of interest

Especially fitting if read backwards

You can call him whatever you like, but the guy would be hanged or shot for high treason in a better Germany.

It was not as bad as you might think. Poland lobbied to build Yamal-2, which would cut off Ukraine from their gas revenue to Europe. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Yamal-europe.png France, Germany and the Netherlands decided against cutting off Ukraine with Yamal-2 and build Nordstream instead. Poland was also using reperations rhetorics and pressuring Germany with it. They also betrayed the EU shortly before they joined and negotiated the contract for yamal, the tarrifs and stuff alone in secret with Russia, while they knew that we planned for the entry-exit system and to ditch the tariff system. NIK the Supreme Audit Office of Poland investigated Marek Pol and Leszek Miller for it and carefully used words which implicate corruption. Everything is documented and laid out by prof. Przemysław Żurawski vel Grajewski Chairman of the Security and Defense Council to the President of the Republic of Poland in his paper "Gas from Russia and the energy security of the Visegrad Group"

Schroder is still a top administrator in some big Russian corporation

>Europe and Russia were trying to build good relations after the Sowjet Union And this itself disproves one of Ruzzia's narrative for their justification of invading Ukraine("EU is bad to us" bs).

Just that you believe that Putin was a different character tells a lot. There were top politicians benefiting personally from dirty deals with Russia, they had interest in painting a good narrative. That game was never clean. If it wasn’t for unpopularity of the war on Ukraine with the voters they would have kept the relationship going (which quite frankly a lot of them still do).

>Putin, at the time, was also a very different character Eeeh. Seemed to be different lol. 

And yet the whole east block was already telling that it's dangerous back then. It's easy to say it was different times but truth is he was corrupted pos and German accepted those deals because they were good for their short term future.

There's a difference between building good relations and purposefully creating a strategic dependency. Even at the time, Eastern European countries were screaming that Nord Stream was a trap. Schroeder didn’t just miss the signals, he actually helped the signal jammer.

>Putin, at the time, was also a very different character than he is today Yeah right, like how different he was when he invaded Georgia? Or when he occupied Ichkeria? It was just convenient for Europe because it didn't affect them and it was profitable to look the other way. Please stop this naive BS to rationalize the blunder that was tight economic relationship with Russia. >right thing to do This here just tells me "we didn't make a mistake, the circumstances just changed" and it signals that people like you will not learn the lesson.

Just before and during Schröders reign Russia was involved in multiple wars throughout europe, supporting russian-aligned independence movements in Georgia and moldova, and fighting against chechnyan independence. And not even 10 years later they annexed large parts of Ukraine. This was not a "different Putin" we just didn't care about the countries he attacked.

>Putin, at the time, was also a very different character than he is today. A few decades later, things obviously didn't turn out as hoped. But at that time it was a strong signal towards peace and stability and simply the right thing to do. Was he? I'm not dismissing the idea outright, but looking back it honestly looks more like he was just being a wolf in sheep's clothing by exploiting the circumistances of the time. Freedom of speech and press was still poor to nonexistent under his tenure, he still gathered his own circle of oligarchs, and he still ran a cult of personality heavily resembling the Czar order of old. He reduced Grozny to rubble in the second Chechen war, invaded Georgia in ´08, then Ukraine in 2014. He funded propaganda campaigns, separatist and anti-EU movements, and supported puppet governments lavishly. There was a lot of sympathy towards Russia in Europe in the early 2000s because of what a shit 90s they had, and the general post-Cold War atmosphere. It's not hard to see a dictator calculatedly exploiting that sympathy to establish financial dependencies, which could in turn be exploited further down the line for leverage. The thing about dictators of Putin's caliber is that they can genuinely plan far, far ahead. And if your long term goal is to destabilize the EU and reestablish the Soviet sphere of influence, Putin's actions are pretty much exactly in line with that.

Citations needed. It was a different climate, where blind hope (blinded by c**** Russian gas) trumped any long term security concerns and corrupted German politics for years to come. All that despite the warnings of the Finns, the Baltics and most of Eastern Europe. That blindness lasted through Crimea’s occupation and the veil only fell after the full invasion. It was certainly not the right thing to do. The 2nd Chechen War, the frozen conflicts in Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan were ample warning.

Different times with the same climate, it was just that Schroeder was a useful idiot who had no idea what the climate actually was. Germany got played so hard by Russia and Putin knew what he was setting up, whilst Germany just went “Ooh that’s awfully c**** gas on offer, there’s no way there’s a poison pill hidden in there”.

>Putin, at the time, was also a very different character than he is today. He wasn't.

And Schroeder immediately disavowed and left Russia after it invaded Ukraine, *right*?

You conveniently forgot to mention Putin's decision to stop exporting gas to Germany which caused an energy crisis in Europe. Making a sociopatic dictator your only supplier of a vital resource is not very smart, regardless if it's moral or not (and in case of Russia it isn't). 

Germany had a f*** tonne of nuclear before that and was always a manufacturing goods powerhouse. You don’t think that German car companies were all founded in the 2000s do you? All the nuclear got shut down in the end and replaced by gas, you know the opposite of what everyone is trying to do now. It was categorically not the right pathway!

If that was the whole story it would make sense, but it is not. Furthermore, even in that limited scope Russia needs Germany for their economy. Otherwise they would cut off the supply to the whole of Europe years ago

It's evil if it makes you dependent on an aggressive, imperialistic regime that started the biggest war in Europe since WWII and uses gas deliveries as political weapon (e.g. Russia stopped gas deliveries to Germany via Nord Stream 1 at the beginning of the war). Btw, the Schröder led government in 2000 decided against nuclear power, making Germany even more dependent on Russian gas.

He gets windowed if he just ends it now for nothing. What he needs is a way to spin ending it as a victory.

> Gerhard Schroder started the de-nuclearization of Germans nuclear reactors in favor of gas dependency Are you even aware under what you are commenting?

No, just the stupidity and naivety of the Western world. The FSB always wins on this.

Russia is even doing your job now.

Two things can be right, but his legacy will forever be being putin's lapdog.