With its long wooden pier poking out into the Baltic Sea and a three-mile sweep of sandy beach fringed with forests, the small German town of Lubmin is known for its gentle tourism.
As the summer season dwindles to its blustery end, clusters of elderly folk are out for a stroll and cyclists stop for refreshment in streets lined with hotels, smart villas and Scandinavian-style holiday homes.
Few seem aware this former fishing village on the country’s north coast has become the focal point of a new Cold War between Europe and Russia that is a key factor in the current crisis that has seen wholesale gas prices in Britain soaring 250 per cent since start of the year.
The cause can be found a couple of miles away, where a tangle of gauges, pipes, silver-wrapped tubes and tall chimneys sit behind high fences and security cameras in a sprawling industrial site sliced into pine forests.
ALL SMILES: Why has Germany under Angela Merkel, who will step down after 16 years as the country's leader after today's election, been playing into Putin's hands?
This is the landing point for Nord Stream 2 – a new £8.1 billion pipeline running from Russia across the Baltic Sea to supply Europe with gas. Its strategic importance cannot be overstated at a time when the necessity of stable energy supplies has been highlighted so dramatically.
‘It’s not a problem for us. We don’t recognise Nord Stream as anything to do with Lubmin,’ said the woman in the tourist office, handing me a leaflet extolling the delights of the region’s maritime traditions.
But it very much does pose a serious problem for the rest of Europe – and the United States.
Look behind all the headlines about fuel bills shooting up, energy firms going bust and even fears over a possible shortage of Christmas turkeys and you find a trail leading back to this peaceful little seaside resort.
The controversial 764-mile twin pipeline, running from Vyborg, near St Petersburg, to this German town by the Polish border, will give Vladimir Putin a stranglehold on Europe’s energy supplies.
‘Nord Stream 2 allows Putin to use gas as a targeted weapon and undermines Nato,’ says Tory MP Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. ‘Giving Putin more power over energy networks makes us more vulnerable to his dictatorship and that’s bad for all of us.’
The pipeline was completed this month and such is Putin’s determination to win approval for the next stage and ensure his gas starts flowing that analysts believe he deliberately squeezed European supplies to cynically drive up prices and put pressure on regulators in Berlin and Brussels to give him the go-ahead to open the taps. This is in defiance of economic sanctions put in place against Russia in 2014 after it illegally annexed Crimea.
The German town of is the landing point for Nord Stream 2, a new £8.1 billion pipeline running from Russia across the Baltic Sea to supply Europe with gas
Some experts say that what Putin is doing is reminiscent of actions of the Arab-led cartel of Opec oil-producing countries in the early 1970s, when oil prices quadrupled with devastating consequences after they cut back supplies by 25 per cent. They were accused by the then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of ‘political blackmail’.
This is, after all, a highly political project backed by the state-owned Russian energy giant Gazprom.
Russia supplies about 40 per cent of the UK and EU’s energy but this costly project makes little commercial sense since there is plentiful capacity through existing networks in Ukraine, Poland and the first Nord Stream, completed in 2010.
It puts a noose around Ukraine, however, since it lets Russia circumvent routes that earn Kiev big sums each year, and even to cut off all supplies in any future conflict without harming its own economy or hurting friendly countries such as Germany.
And the manipulative Russian leader has a grim track record of using his country’s rich resources as a weapon to further strategic aims and undermine democracy.
So why has Germany under Angela Merkel, who will step down after 16 years as the country’s leader after today’s election, been playing into Putin’s hands?
Lubmin has become the focal point of a new Cold War between Europe and Russia that is a key factor in the current crisis that has seen wholesale gas prices in Britain soaring 250 per cent since start of the year
The answers lie in three key members of the German establishment who played a pivotal role in cosying up to the Kremlin: Merkel herself, her Social Democrat predecessor Gerhard Schroder, and the pipeline project’s boss, a former Stasi spy who became best friends with Putin.
Schroder, who became German Chancellor in 1998 and was a Centre-Left ally of Tony Blair, originally gave approval for the project. Tellingly, he has been derided as Putin’s ‘errand boy’ by the jailed Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny.
Germany’s traditional closeness to Russia means that despite Putin’s domestic repression and foreign meddling, public attitudes in Germany tend to be more positive about their near-neighbour than in most Western nations.
Yet this does not explain why Schroder signed the deal for Nord Stream 2 a few days after losing the 2005 election – and then weeks later joined the board of the firm running the project. He subsequently became its chairman.
He went on to celebrate his 70th birthday at a party in St Petersburg with Putin just after Russia invaded Crimea, then became chairman of Rosneft, a state-owned oil giant subject to EU sanctions over links to the annexation.
Yet Schroder faces more hostility in his party for tightening state benefits than over his role in Russia. ‘People on the Left dislike his labour reforms, not that he has become a lackey to Putin,’ said Alan Posener, author and columnist for German daily newspaper Die Welt.
‘Nord Stream 2 allows Putin to use gas as a targeted weapon and undermines Nato,’ says Tory MP Tom Tugendhat, (pictured) chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. ‘Giving Putin
