Olaf Scholz has been urged to impose sanctions on Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor from 1998 to 2005, whose friendship with President Putin and extensive commercial ties to the Kremlin have drawn heavy criticism.
The Christian Democrats, the main opposition party, said that Schröder should be subjected to asset freezes and travel restrictions within the European Union because he was “complicit in financing the brutal war in Ukraine”.
Schröder’s tenure coincided with Putin’s early years in charge of Russia. The pair, who supposedly first met over beers in a sauna and spent at least one Christmas sledging together, found themselves in alignment on a host of issues from Germany’s need for Russian gas to their shared scepticism over the Iraq war.
In recent weeks, however, even politicians from Schröder’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) who were previously sympathetic to Russia have distanced themselves from their former leader.
He continues to sit on the board of Rosneft, one of the largest energy companies under Putin’s ultimate control, and has publicly appealed to Germany and the EU to moderate their sanctions on Moscow. He has also travelled to Moscow in an apparently futile attempt to broker peace in Ukraine through direct negotiations with Putin.
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Schröder’s determination to personally maintain “bridges” to the Kremlin has brought him considerable opprobrium in Germany and Brussels.
This month Schröder, 77, was on a list of political figures censured by the European parliament for their involvement in Russian influence campaigns. Several constituency associations have launched proceedings to have him expelled from the party.
Today Michael Brand, the human rights spokesman for the centre-right group in the Bundestag, said it was time to go a step further and place him under EU sanctions, describing him as a “foreign agent of Putin”.
“He has personally been placed by Putin in leadership roles in the Russian energy sector and so earns hundreds of thousands of euros for representing Putin’s interests,” Brand told Der Tagesspiegel. “I can very well imagine that it turns the stomachs of many Social Democrats on a daily basis when they have to watch this.”
