Schwerin (Germany): Between a tram stop and a kebab shop, the gray building in the northeastern German city of Schwerin looks innocuous enough - and so does its tenant, the Foundation for the Protection of the Climate and Environment.
Yet this regional foundation, created 23 months ago by the local state government, has done little for the climate. Instead, it served as a conduit for at least ₹165 million from the Kremlin-owned energy firm Gazprom to build one of the world's most contested gas pipelines: Nord Stream 2.
The United States in 2020 was threatening sanctions against any company working on the pipeline. The thinking was that putting companies under the umbrella of a foundation would deter Washington from imposing the penalties because it would then effectively be targeting a German government body.
So the climate foundation helped companies lease port space to service a Russian pipe-laying vessel, bought a multimillion-dollar rock-laying freighter and brokered a host of other transactions.
"Mission accomplished," the head of the foundation, Erwin Sellering, a former state governor, wrote on its website in January, celebrating the pipeline's completion.
Any feeling of celebration ended a month later, however, after Russian troops swept into Ukraine, an invasion that forced a national reckoning about German complicity in Moscow's ambitions. The climate foundation is now under investigation by the state parliament. "This is as crazy as it gets - that a German government authority is taking money from Gazprom to complete the pipeline Gazprom can't because they are under US sanctions," said Constantin Zerger of DUH, a prominent German environmental watchdog.
Activists like him had questioned the point of the pipeline from the start. Germany already got 55% of its gas through another direct pipeline from Russia, Nord Stream 1.
Today Nord Stream 2 is all but dead politically - and also damaged by a mysterious explosion in September. Yet not long ago German leaders argued that Russian gas was a strategic national interest and dismissed geopolitical concerns about the pipeline raised by the US, Poland and other countries. The pipeline was a priority for Moscow and Berlin alike, with German officials from both major parties acting as eager cheerleaders.
Nowhere was that more obvious than in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, one of Germany's poorest states and once part of the former Communist East, where both pipelines come ashore. Older generations there grew up on Soviet culture, and still remember when America was the enemy and Moscow the protector.
Sellering was an ally of former Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, a fellow Social Democrat, personal friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin and lobbyist for Russian energy firms. Schroder's conservative successor, Angela Merkel, whose constituency was in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, approved Nord Stream 2 after Russia's 2014 invasion of Crimea, and defended it even after Moscow hacked the German parliament, assassinated a Chechen rebel in central Berlin, and poisoned the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.
Before the war, the current chancellor, Olaf Scholz, called Nord Stream 2 a "private-sector project" and last year, when he was finance minister, he personally wrote to his US counterpart to demand a stop to sanctions.
Both Scholz and Merkel knew of the climate foundation. Neither of them spoke out against it, nor apparently minded as Moscow invested generously in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and reactivated Cold War networks, including former spies, to deliver on the pipeline. nyt
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