Germany’s Merkel under pressure to cancel Russia pipeline project after Navalny poisoning
Germany’s Merkel under pressure to cancel Russia pipeline project after Navalny poisoning
But even as Merkle has demanded answers from Moscow, she has also showed little sign of wavering in her support for Nord Stream 2, a planned natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has dubbed “Putin’s Pipeline.”
The Trump administration has threatened expanded sanctions on Russia related to the project.
Now, as Western leaders face decisions on how to respond to the poisoning, Merkel’s backing of the project is under new scrutiny, both from within her party and among other allies. Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s wife, blamed “state terrorists” Thursday for the attack.
Norbert Röttgen, a senior member of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party and head of the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, said that Nord Stream 2 must be halted to punish Putin.
“His message is clear: Resistance to his regime is life threatening,” he said in a statement. “In this context diplomatic rituals are no longer enough. ”
Nerve agents in the Novichok family were used in previous attacks blamed on Russian agents. European Union diplomats were discussing what steps to take after the German announcement, including a possible international investigation.
But European Commission spokesman Peter Stano said new sanctions were not yet being discussed because the culprit has not yet been conclusively identified.
“This kind of chemical agent is not freely available. It was used on Russian territory against a Russian citizen,” Stano said. “We need answers. There needs to be an investigation.”
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, called on Europe and Germany not to rush to judgment, adding that Russia has little information on the basis of the German findings. He said any talk of sanctions against Russia was “unacceptable.”
“We do not understand the reason for raising the topic of sanctions,” he said Thursday. “We certainly would not want our partners in Germany and other European countries to rush to judgment. We would prefer dialogue.”
Katrin Göring-Eckardt, co-chair of the Greens in the German parliament, said that a “blatant attempted murder executed by the mafia-like structures of the Kremlin cannot just leave us worried.”
“It must have real consequences,” she said, citing the pipeline project, which is near completion. German newspaper editorials also called for it to be scrapped.
Germany announced Wednesday it would consult with its allies on an appropriate response and was reporting the crime to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Western officials expressed shock over the use of the nerve agent against the opposition leader.
“The main question is how far the [European Union] and particularly the U.S. will dare to go, given the damage that could be caused to them,” Ivan Timofeyev, program director at the Russian Council for International Affairs, told the business newspaper Kommersant.
Navalny’s wife posted on Instagram a joyful family vacation selfie taken by her husband with their two children on a canal boat with a bridge in the background.
She wrote that “state terrorists will remain with their Novichok, eating it with Rafaello,” referring to the chocolate. “And they will always have to live with it, no matter how many years they stand with a candle at Easter in a church.”
After news from the Charité Hospital in Berlin on Wednesday that Navalny was still in an induced coma on a ventilator but that his condition was slowly improving, she said she was sure he would recover.
“Alexei will certainly recover, and we will laugh at him again and whine that we do not want to be photographed for his Instagram a thousand times a day,” she wrote.
After her husband fell ill Aug. 20 during a trip to Siberia, Navalnaya wrote to Putin in a personal appeal to let her husband be evacuated from Omsk to Germany for treatment.
Her appeal came as Russian doctors at Omsk Hospital No. 1 were denying he had been poisoned and refusing to allow him to leave the country. Navalny’s aides said the 48-hour delay in evacuating Navalny endangered his life.
Russian opposition figures have blamed the poisoning on Putin, given that Novichok is believed to be available only to state agencies.
Novichok, developed in the Soviet Union, was used in the attempted assassination of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, Britain, in 2018. British authorities charged two Russian military intelligence agents over the poisoning, which British officials said was probably ordered at a senior level of the Russian state.
Russian officials Thursday also doubled down on their denials that Navalny was poisoned inside Russia. State-controlled media outlets played down the incident and raised a whirl of doubt about the German findings. Some lawmakers even tried to cast blame on the United States and Western-leaning countries such as Georgia.
The head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service Sergei Naryshkin said the Navalny situation could be a provocation by Western intelligence agencies. “This cannot be ruled out,” Naryshkin told Interfax news agency.
Navalny is the latest in a succession of Kremlin critics suspected or confirmed to have been poisoned, including the Skripals. Others include the crusading journalist and Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya, who fell ill on a flight in 2004 after drinking tea and believed she was poisoned. She survived but was shot dead outside her apartment in 2006.
Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian intelligence agent living in exile in London, was fatally poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 in 2006 while drinking tea in a hotel in the British capital. A British inquiry later implicated Putin in the killing.
The husband of prominent Navalny associate Lyubov Sobol was stabbed with a syringe outside the couple’s home in 2016 and injected with a substance that sent him into convulsions. He survived.
Dixon reported from Moscow. Fiona Weber-Steinhaus in Berlin and Michael Birnbaum in Riga, Latvia, contributed to this report.
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