As NATO scrambled to coordinate defensive support against Russia’s massive troop buildup at Ukraine’s border, its largest Western European member was conspicuously AWOL.
Germany, a vast country near the front line of the confrontation, has so far limited its response to sending 5,000 secondhand helmets to help Ukraine brace for an invasion. This prompted Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko in an interview with the German tabloid Bild to ask what the Germans would be sending next: “pillows?”
Berlin has gone so far in refusing to support NATO allies as to deny constituent nations permits for exports of German-origin weapons to Kyiv.
Estonia, a small NATO member in the Baltic that shares a border with Russia, has waited over a month for German approval to dispatch 10 Soviet-made howitzer guns to Ukraine. East Germany had acquired the old cannons following German reunification in the 1990s. Estonia later purchased them from Finland which had gained possession.
Estonian Defense Ministry official Kristo Enn Vaga said that his country was trying to help Ukraine because it could be “next on the Russian bear’s menu.”
Anticipating similar delays in obtaining overflight permission, the U.K. dispatched defensive Ukraine weapons transfers — including some 2,000 anti-tank missiles — around Germany along longer bypass routs.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has urged that Germany will also have to be persuaded in supporting severe sanctions aimed at deterring Russian incursion into Ukraine, and Latvian Defense Minister Artis Pabriks has charged that Germany’s divisive European stance against Ukraine defense is immoral.
Why the German resistance to defending Ukraine — or likely more paramount, reluctance to offend Russia?
Because having purposely dismantled their own energy supply capacities, they now depend on Russia to keep their lights on, their homes heated, their industries producing, and their businesses open.
As Germany enters the winter heating season, Russia accounts for over half of the country’s natural gas, and a quarter of oil imports.
This is occurring at a time when Germany has sabotaged itself to become even more dependent on Russian gas by already shutting down three nuclear plants in December, with three more to be mothballed this year.
Simultaneously, coal plant shutdowns across Europe have left populations even more dependent on natural gas — including as backup for heavily subsidized intermittent solar and wind. Making matters even worse, a lag in wind production last summer has contributed to soaring gas prices as Europe now enters winter with little reserve storage.
Meanwhile, the global market lacks capacity to make up any eventual loss of Russian gas by substituting it with liquefied natural gas, or LNG, from the U.S. or the Middle East.
By killing nuclear and coal, while failing to develop its own technically recoverable massive shale gas resources, Germany, and the broader EU, have legitimate reasons to worry that Russia will weaponize its energy life support supply leverage to advance its territorial agendas.
They did so before when Gazprom cut off Ukraine’s gas supply for 13 days during a 2009 dispute with painful effects extending to Poland and other European countries.
Political blunders that got Germany — and by extension Europe and the Baltics — into this mess, should be a lesson for America beginning 20 years ago when then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder decided to phase out nuclear energy over three decades.
Angela Merkel, who succeeded Schröder in 2005, accelerated the process, with the country’s last nuclear-power plants due to go offline this year, a decade ahead of schedule.
It was under Schröder’s term of office when Germany and Russia agreed to build a Nord Stream trans-Baltic Sea gas pipeline linking the two countries. Then, following his electoral defeat to Merkel, Schröder went on to chair the supervisory boards of both Nord Stream and the Russian state-controlled oil firm Rosneft.
Chancellor Merkel teamed up with President Vladimir Putin to counter widespread opposition to Nord Stream 2, a second pipeline running alongside the first one, which European allies feared would increase already high reliance on Russian gas.
Nord Stream 2, which is now completed and awaiting certification, would double the amount of direct Russian gas exports to Germany.
Merkel was also central in working to shield Russian gas exports from sanctions imposed after Moscow invaded Ukraine in 2014, emphasizing the importance of trying to improve Europe’s relations with Russia.
German diplomats, along with others, rejected the idea of freezing Russia out of the Swift payments system, a leading global intermediary between international banks that executes the bulk of financial transactions.
Mrs. Merkel has since been replaced with a coalition led by a Social Democratic Party (SPD) that is even softer on Russia.
Influential SPD officials have said the pipeline’s fate shouldn’t be tied to Ukraine’s, and new Chancellor Olaf Scholz has only vaguely allowed that “everything will have to be discussed” after an invasion.
None of this Russia energy stronghold over Germany was necessary.
The Trump administration had pressed Germany to build liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminals to diversify its gas supply, as Poland, the Netherlands and Lithuania have done.
Instead, German LNG terminals became ensnarled in permitting delays, and one company last year decided to turn an LNG project into a “green hydrogen hub,” including an import terminal for ammonia and an electrolysis plant.
The Biden administration has been directly complicit in this disaster.
After inexplicably cancelling the U.S.-Canadian Keystone XL pipeline during his first day in office, Joe Biden subsequently also lifted Trump administration sanctions on Nord Stream 2.
Although Biden says he now backs a return to U.S. Nord Stream 2 sanctions if Russia invades Ukraine, and new Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s administration has signaled that an escalation of the crisis could cause Germany to agree not to license its use, a cold dark European winter may change that calculus.
Unfortunately for Ukraine, any Russia post-invasion consequences will have arrived too late.
Without firing a shot, Mr. Putin has attacked the trans-Atlantic alliance at its two weakest links, Berlin’s Federal Chancellery, and the Washington, D.C., White House.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 11 books, "Beyond Flagpoles and Footprints: Pioneering the Space Frontier" co-authored with Buzz Aldrin (2021), is available on Amazon along with all others. Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.