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Take an exclusive look behind Russia's gas monopoly as the dubious facade of the secretive energy giant Gazprom is revealed.
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00:04The gas business has been a source of conflict
00:07since the days of the Cold War
00:09because the gas that Europe in particular urgently needs
00:13comes from Russia,
00:14a deal that entails enormous political dependencies.
00:20So this was all seen as part of an overall Soviet strategy
00:24to weaken the West and to break up NATO.
00:27No unfounded fears.
00:32Using oil and gas dependencies, also as a political weapon,
00:36is something that was commonplace in the Warsaw Pact.
00:41Meanwhile, an extraordinary career began.
00:44As a case officer, you have to be able to manipulate people.
00:48There is no such thing as former KGB guy.
00:51Vladimir Putin became one of the most powerful men in the world.
00:55The gas business was declared a top priority.
00:59Russia's president knew about his country's greatest treasure.
01:02He said, we do have more oil and gas than anyone else
01:06and people should remember that.
01:10The Europeans know that there's no truly reliable alternative
01:16to Russia as an energy partner.
01:19German governments in particular continued to rely on the blue gold from Russia.
01:25There was no question as to who was in the driver's seat.
01:29Where do you extract raw materials?
01:32Which fields do we get access to?
01:34What pipelines are there?
01:35If you don't have any, and that's the case here,
01:38we have to look for ways to be compensated.
01:43Gazprom set the prices and the conditions.
01:46Anyone who rebelled was punished.
01:49You can very well call it a state of war
01:52when someone turns off the gas tap in the 21st century.
01:56Despite brutal, threatening gestures and gas cuts in Eastern Europe,
02:01Russia's aggressive foreign policy continued to be tolerated, and more.
02:05The idea that you would still build up this dependence on Russian energy
02:09was thought of as crazy.
02:13And then Nord Stream will play its part in ensuring
02:16that Europe has a secure gas supply in the future.
02:20Russia remained the guarantor of gas economic stability in Western Europe,
02:24while the political consequences were ignored.
02:28Gazprom is part of the Russian army.
02:30It's one of their weapons.
02:45Russia, Western Siberia.
02:47Here, the indigenous people of the region hold on to all traditions.
02:52The Nenets live from reindeer husbandry.
02:54Breeder Maiko Sirioetto's herd has known the route through the tundra
02:59up to the northern Kara Sea for decades.
03:02But suddenly the Nenets have to rethink
03:05Gazprom has opened up a gas field in the middle of their route.
03:12Our way with the animals through the tundra
03:14is becoming more and more difficult.
03:16Railway tracks, pipes and roads, it's a big problem.
03:23The once untouched nature is history.
03:27After the river, the hard asphalt around the Bovonenkovo gas field awaits.
03:33The provisional solution on this day,
03:35Gazprom workers roll out bales of cloth on the road.
03:39This keeps the wooden runners of the Nenets sleds protected on the concrete crossing.
03:45Good afternoon.
03:47Hello, I'm the foreman.
03:49Pleased to meet you.
03:51How does it look?
03:52It wasn't quite that easy, was it?
03:54Yes, some animals didn't want to cross at first.
04:06Just like the red carpet.
04:13A togetherness born out of necessity.
04:16However, no one here knows how long the crossing at Bovonenkovo
04:20will remain passable for the Nenets and their reindeer.
04:24A conflict that Gazprom employees on site are well aware of.
04:30Man has come here and destroyed the unity and harmony of nature.
04:34On the other hand, he has opened up new areas.
04:37He's extracting gas from nature's resources.
04:40And that also brings good things.
04:42That feeds our families and creates many, many jobs.
04:52Gazprom employed 1,200 people in 2019 at the Bovonenkovo gas field alone.
04:58Ten years ago, locksmith Sergei Povetkin came here for the first time.
05:04I wanted to be where the gas comes from.
05:07To be there at the source, participate in the process.
05:11The first time I was here, there was no gas flowing.
05:14But I was totally overwhelmed by the amount of tubes and metal structures.
05:18I was immediately fascinated.
05:252012, Gazprom finally started production here.
05:29A high security wing, a kind of Russian gold reserve.
05:36We're hooked on gas and oil like a drug needle.
05:39Take them away, and then what?
05:41Withdrawal symptoms?
05:45We can't do without them.
05:48Take them away, what's left of our economy?
05:50Crash.
05:54But it wasn't just the Russians themselves who needed their blue gold.
05:59Europe was also dependent on gas.
06:01Gas from Russia.
06:02A dependence that Gazprom had known how to exploit for decades.
06:07And one that helped Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, achieve unprecedented power.
06:13Shortly before, Gazprom cut off the flow of gas to Ukraine for a short time, in a dispute over a
06:21price increase.
06:22The effects were also felt by other European countries.
06:26A boost for Gazprom's pipeline plans beyond the transit countries' Nord Stream.
06:35New chairman of the shareholders' committee, Mr. Schroeder.
06:40You know that we have a growing demand for gas in Western Europe and a declining self-supply within Western
06:46Europe.
06:47And that's why it's extremely important to build this pipeline to be able to reasonably satisfy the additional demand that
06:54there is and will continue to be.
07:04In the early discussions, Russians were not connecting Nord Stream 1, who was removing transit flow from Ukraine into different
07:12routes.
07:13They were saying it's new gas.
07:14But they were lying to everybody about what their real intent was.
07:21While the German ex-chancellor was active as a lobbyist, a central pipeline was blown up in the middle of
07:27winter, which supplied Georgia with gas.
07:31Previously, the Georgian government had refused to sell its own pipelines to Russia.
07:35The Georgians suspected a plot and felt blackmailed.
07:40I think the world should wake up to this threat, because yesterday it was Ukraine, today it's much worse than
07:45Georgia.
07:46Tomorrow it can be any other European country that is dependent on this irresponsible and unpredictable supplier.
07:54Gazprom has long since launched a counter-campaign.
07:59We have been assured by Mr. Miller that there will be no problems in the future with Germany's supply.
08:05After all, there have been no problems with the German supply either.
08:11A little later, Alexei Miller struck a different tone with EU ambassadors in Moscow.
08:18Money alone wasn't enough.
08:20He said the EU had to commit itself unreservedly to Russia.
08:24The head of Gazprom said, get over your hostility to Russia or you won't get any gas.
08:30They thought they were in an imperial position when it came to natural gas.
08:42In 2005, they took us all to Western Siberia.
08:46And then we had the dinner with President Putin.
08:49I asked him, is Russia an energy superpower?
08:52And so he looked at me and he said, oh, I think, you know, energy superpower is an old-fashioned
08:58Cold War term.
08:59But, he said, we do have more oil and gas than anyone else and people should remember that.
09:05The Germans didn't forget.
09:07In 2006, the Chancellor and the BASF CEO travelled to Siberia, a new access to a new gas field.
09:15Even then, of course, there were thoughts of building pipelines to the east.
09:20Gases needed there, in China.
09:22That's another reason why it was geopolitically important for us to secure these gas reserves for ourselves in Europe.
09:31In parallel, the pipeline was being pushed ahead, without the states of Eastern Europe being asked.
09:40The Polish Defence Minister, Radek Sikorski, was worried by the solo effort at the time.
09:46Today, he's a member of the European Parliament.
09:48There's a long history of very ominous, direct relationships between Germany and Russia.
09:56We count among those the partitions of Poland and then, of course, the Hitler-Stalin pact.
10:01When Germany and Russia fix something together over our heads, we don't like it.
10:06We feel threatened by it.
10:11The Europeans know that there's no truly reliable alternative to Russia as an energy partner.
10:21But Europe should not pretend that the Russians had to be grateful for being allowed to supply oil and gas
10:30to Europe.
10:30On the contrary, the Europeans should make allowances for the pride of the Russian people, the vulnerability of the Russian
10:40soul, and the special features of the country's history.
10:47Putin's power depended on efficient exploitation of Russia's energy reserves.
10:53You could see Russian production decline very rapidly with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
10:59It came back very strongly in the 2000s.
11:02Russian production had recovered, oil prices went up, and Vladimir Putin rode into a stronger and stronger position on the
11:10back of rising oil prices.
11:13Gazprom's influence was growing and the company wanted to appear open to the world.
11:17In 2006, the company invited a British film crew.
11:20Gas from the likes of the Orangoy field has made this company wildly wealthy, and they let us have a
11:26rare glimpse inside the company's nerve center.
11:29The TV team was even allowed to film the control center.
11:32The managers were brimming with self-confidence.
11:36The next benchmark will be one trillion.
11:39Biggest company in the world?
11:40Yes.
11:43The British reporter was presented with the entire Gazprom headquarters.
11:47It didn't look like a trillion in sales yet.
11:51The sanatorium for employees and the small Gazprom TV studio also looked modest.
12:01Thirteen years later, we were also given a tour of the group.
12:05Nothing here was modest anymore.
12:13Gazprom had earned over 200 billion euros from its gas business with Germany alone since 2006.
12:26Sochi, a city on the Black Sea and the venue of the Winter Olympics 2014, sponsored by Gazprom, among others.
12:34An employee takes us on a tour of the Olympic Stadium.
12:43Gazprom is also hard to miss in St. Petersburg.
12:46Even if completion inside is a long time coming, Gazprom's new headquarters is the tallest building in Europe.
12:59In the year 2021, however, after years of planning, the Lacta Center still stood empty.
13:06A backdrop.
13:07Millions for a hollow symbol of power.
13:23Russia seemed to be a struggling country economically.
13:26But then, you know, the big boon for Putin was that energy prices then were rising so fast.
13:32And that, I think, emboldened him to do a lot of things that he wouldn't have done otherwise.
13:44Putin's global agenda was becoming more ambitious and aggressive.
13:49Tens of thousands of people had died since the beginning of his term in Chechnya.
13:53An ex-Soviet republic that wanted to be independent of Moscow.
14:05A courageous journalist criticised Putin for the brutal war.
14:11The situation is constant.
14:14Human rights are totally disregarded.
14:17After two attempts to poison the journalist,
14:20she was shot dead in the elevator outside her Moscow apartment on October 7, 2006.
14:26It was Putin's 54th birthday.
14:32Former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko publicly exposed the president shortly thereafter.
14:38This was a direct question.
14:41Who killed Anu?
14:42Somebody has asked you directly,
14:44who is guilty of Anu's death?
14:46Who has killed her?
14:47I ask the direct answer.
14:48Anu killed Mr. Putin, President of the Russian Federation.
14:51And I can directly answer you.
14:53It is Mr. Putin, the President of the Russian Federation, who has killed her.
14:56Three days after the murder,
14:58Vladimir Putin was visiting Angela Merkel in Germany.
15:11In a TV interview that same evening,
15:13Putin praised Merkel's ability to listen well.
15:16A few days later,
15:19Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with a radioactive substance in Great Britain.
15:24He died in agony after weeks in the hospital.
15:30Vladimir Putin had one more appointment beforehand during his visit to Dresden.
15:36He introduced Gazprom as the new sponsor of the Bundesliga club Schalke Noviya.
15:42Gazprom invested over 200 million euros.
15:45Gazprom needed to essentially charm its way into the hearts of German football fans
15:51so that it legitimised what it was doing.
15:54So it would be just seen as a legitimate member of the ecosystem
15:57so that people wouldn't ask questions
15:59and they wouldn't feel as though there was something strange or insidious about all of this.
16:06Soon it was impossible to imagine the Bundesliga and the Champions League without Gazprom.
16:14Sport is very important to people.
16:16People fall in love with sport.
16:18They feel very passionately about it.
16:20And so because of that,
16:21people had almost this unquestioning relationship,
16:25not just with Gazprom,
16:27but by implication with the Kremlin.
16:29That proxy war that we've lived for the last ten years
16:32is intended to disrupt, divide, deceive.
16:35Sponsorship and spending on sport has been part of that proxy war.
16:40So whilst many of us may think,
16:42well, we've been watching a UEFA Champions League game sponsored by Gazprom,
16:46we've been watching Schalke sponsored by Gazprom,
16:49in reality we've been watching a weapon that has been deployed.
16:55Gazprom's most powerful lobbying weapon was Gerhard Schröder.
16:59At the Nord Stream race, he fired the starting gun in Kiel in 2019.
17:04Here too, the political turbulence seemed detached from the sporting event.
17:13After all, the motto of this regatta is connecting Baltics,
17:17and we connect sports, cultures, clubs, sailors of different nations.
17:21And in the end, that's exactly what Nord Stream is doing as well.
17:25A great contribution actually also to international understanding
17:28and for the coexistence of cultures.
17:33The route led the sailors of the long-distance regatta to St. Petersburg,
17:38always along the Baltic Sea pipeline.
17:55Meanwhile, Schröder seized the PR opportunity,
17:58another stage for Gazprom.
18:08There is, ladies and gentlemen, let's face it,
18:11a hell of a lot of trouble all over the world.
18:15And isn't it nice that there are then events like this
18:19that make it clear that you can live differently,
18:22peacefully, amicably, and in a way that benefits us all?
18:31Transfiguration as a method, Schröder knew how to do it,
18:34and the partners were satisfied.
18:40If you have such a precious instrument, you have to protect it from all sides.
18:45Propaganda is one of the elements of protection.
18:50Gazprom has continued to play out its power, publicly or in back rooms, to this day.
18:55In the year 2007, Miller and his team put pressure on the next former ex-Soviet republic that broke ranks,
19:03Belarus.
19:07As of August the 3rd, 10 a.m., gas supplies to Belarus will be curtailed by about 21 cubic meters
19:15per day.
19:20It's a classic Russian playbook.
19:22The debt you had yesterday, said that's due today, and there'll be a 300% price increase if you don't
19:28pay it.
19:29And if you don't pay it, we're going to cut off the supply.
19:31It's transparent.
19:34Belarus also buckled.
19:35Gazprom's pressure was too great.
19:40We see real efforts on the part of Belarus to solve the debt problem.
19:46We have therefore taken the decision not to implement any supply restrictions today.
19:52We expect all gas debts to be settled by Thursday of next week.
20:02All ex-Soviet republics eventually felt the power of Gazprom.
20:07One example after another was made before the eyes of the world.
20:13December 2007.
20:15Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier met Putin and his chosen successor,
20:20Dmitry Medvedev, in Moscow.
20:23With him, he opened the next BASF gas field.
20:29Energy supplies from Russia cover almost 40% of German demand in the gas sector.
20:37And that is based on a resilient and trusting energy partnership between German and Russian companies.
20:45This can be allowed to continue in the future.
20:50So getting direct access to the gas fields as well, and not just being dependent on the pipelines, was in
20:56principle the right thing to do.
20:57The question is, how dependent do I make myself?
21:02Steinmeier criticised Frank Umbach's approach in an article.
21:06He had warned against too much dependence on Siberian gas in a new Cold War.
21:11That then led to an argument with Mr. Steinmeier, who said,
21:15No, this is not a Cold War.
21:16This is part of our Ostpolitik, so to speak.
21:19We must not go back to a new East-West conflict.
21:22That is old thinking.
21:24We need new thinking.
21:26Factually, this amounts to wishful thinking and is ultimately something like a collective denial of reality.
21:35There is a school of foreign policy that asserts the deeper the economic relations are, the more harmonious the foreign
21:41policy relationships are.
21:43But it wasn't about a historical disagreement about the power of trade to change foreign policy.
21:48It was about this person and his policy and the risk that he posed.
21:56It wasn't interdependence, all right, but it's the kind of interdependence that you have between wolves and sheep.
22:18The U.S. has overstepped its bounds in all spheres, economic, political and humanitarian.
22:25Well, who likes this?
22:27It leads to the fact that nobody feels safe anymore.
22:32I want to underline that.
22:34Nobody feels safe anymore.
22:39At that time, I was not yet the head of the conference, but I sat in the audience and listened
22:44to it,
22:45and I certainly got how the German-American audience took note of this speech with astonishment,
22:50but without really taking it seriously.
22:58It was the first time very publicly that Vladimir Putin said my attempts at being a partner to the West
23:07or working with the West, that's over.
23:10Russia will now follow and pursue its interests.
23:15Putin was still under the impression of the Orange Revolution, in which Ukrainian politicians who had been working toward EU
23:22membership prevailed.
23:24The Orange Revolution did have a big impact on him.
23:28That was his first major, major defeat in Ukraine.
23:33The color revolutions were beginning in the post-Soviet space, and it was at that speech at the Munich Security
23:40Conference where he said, that era is now over.
23:44In 2008, Putin was invited to a special NATO summit, as so often in the past six years before.
23:53We consider the appearance of a powerful military bloc on our borders as a direct threat to the security of
24:00our country.
24:01We are not satisfied with assurances that this operation is not directed against Russia.
24:07National security is not based on promises.
24:11What he wanted from the United States, certainly, was a recognition that, you know, the European Union and NATO would
24:18never expand anywhere near Russia's borders.
24:21When he didn't get that, then I think he reverted more to true form.
24:25The German government continued to stand by Putin.
24:29NATO is not directed against anyone, certainly not against Russia. Russia is a partner.
24:34Vladimir Putin was allowing Russian nuclear bombers to train near the United States for the first time since 1992.
24:44Vladimir Putin began long-range bomber flights in 2007, and then he began to demonstrate that there cannot be independent,
24:53sovereign countries around Russia.
24:55Putin supported separatists in Georgia with Russian tanks and soldiers, the first European war in the 21st century.
25:06The German war in the 18th century was a greater warm-up act for what he would do in Ukraine.
25:11The dead Georgians didn't change anything concerning the business with Russian gas.
25:21I don't recall any government even seriously talking about boycotting energy in the situation at that time.
25:30Meanwhile, Gazprom was celebrating in Moscow.
25:34The group had been a joint stock company for 15 years.
25:42Our energy exports, including those to far away places, help ensure international energy security.
25:49On the same day, Gazprom threatened Ukraine and used its own media as a stage to do so.
25:59We have already prepared an action plan for tomorrow in connection with the restriction of our gas supplies.
26:08In Kyiv, the message was getting through.
26:12Nothing will change until Ukraine kneels before Russia.
26:17Alexey Miller invited the head of the Ukrainian Gas Company.
26:20He publicly accused Ukraine of stealing Russian gas.
26:23The man was not allowed to defend himself.
26:27At a meeting at Putin's official residence outside Moscow.
26:32Miller reported to the president.
26:35He suggested that the flow of gas to Ukraine should be curtailed.
26:39This should be reduced by the exact amount that the Ukrainians were alleged to have stolen.
26:44Putin agreed. The plan was implemented immediately.
26:51Over 80% of Russia's gas exports to Europe go via pipelines which run through the Ukraine.
26:57And on this coldest day of winter, three of those have basically been shut down.
27:02Romania has a 75% reduction.
27:04And over here, Austria is 90% down.
27:11You can very well call it a state of war when someone turns off the gas tap in the 21st
27:16century.
27:17I can't think of any other word.
27:20Alternative.
27:23This situation is obviously very serious and needs to improve rapidly.
27:31This Ukraine story at the time, the stopping, put certain question marks on Gazprom's reliability as a supplier.
27:38I didn't like that.
27:39I also talked to Alex Miller about it.
27:42He said, well, this will pass.
27:48I was personally in the room of Mr. Miller when he was clearly telling our delegation,
27:54everything you want to discuss, you tell me, here's the phone, I call there, he tells me, yes or no.
28:03If it is about Ukraine, Putin decides.
28:06Putin was waging the gas war with all his might.
28:09Arguments from Ukraine didn't interest him.
28:12It doesn't matter who presents what.
28:15I could just throw all these papers in the oven.
28:21What's important is something else.
28:30No transit country has the right to abuse its position and hold European customers hostage in this way.
28:38The Russians are brilliant propagandists.
28:41Ukraine did not help itself in those days because the suspicion of corruption was quite high and Ukraine was not
28:48always a sympathetic case.
28:49And so the Russians were able to leverage that to say, you poor Europeans are suffering because these irresponsible Ukrainians
28:58are not paying their bill.
28:59Russia has actually been very successful at framing those disputes and blaming Ukraine, blaming Ukraine supposed theft of the gas.
29:12And I think that there's a lot of people in Germany especially who buy into that and agree that actually
29:19the problems with the Ukraine transit are more Ukrainian than they are Russian.
29:27And there's a lot of sympathy, I think, for the Russian point of view in Germany, not necessarily anywhere else,
29:33but I've seen it very much here.
29:35It was Ukraine that was distrusted, not Russia.
29:43On behalf of the Ukrainian state, I would like to declare that contrary to all claims of the Russian leadership,
29:50Ukraine did not steal a single cubic meter of Russian natural gas.
29:55The Ukrainians were fighting back, but were hardly noticed in Germany.
29:59My take is that that particular view builds upon perhaps in particular German narrative vis-a-vis Ukraine.
30:05A narrative in which Ukraine is invisible, and if it is visible, it's only visible through stereotypes.
30:14The EU finally sent supervisors to control the gas flow. Putin continued to pretend innocence.
30:25So I ask you to take all the necessary documents, including contracts. We have nothing to hide there. These are
30:31not secret papers.
30:34My country strongly condemned Russia's actions in Georgia. We also are very troubled by using energy as a tool of
30:45intimidation.
30:47Putin was losing on the propaganda front. In the control center, he continued to blame Ukraine.
30:58It may well be that the state of Ukraine's pipeline network is such that it's not even capable of pumping
31:04through such volumes of gas.
31:06That is also quite possible. But then you have to say that directly and openly.
31:13Finally, Putin let the gas flow again.
31:17This is the senior dispatcher of Gazprom headquarters, Pavlov. I ask you to ensure gas supply through the gas metering
31:24station of Zucca at 10 o'clock Moscow time.
31:29By this time, however, Putin had long since achieved his main goals with Gazprom.
31:36Putin got concessions from the Ukrainian government that they would not try and push for NATO membership.
31:42He got the Black Sea Fleet, which was on a lease basis. He got the Ukrainians to extend that lease
31:48to 2017.
31:50It was very clear that he got those as part of the gas deal negotiations.
31:54And Putin also succeeded in one thing. His German customers stayed with him.
32:00Miller had ensured that the gas always flowed to Germany during the crisis.
32:07Germany has not suffered from the Ukraine gas crisis. Not at all.
32:11It was discussed at one point, and it was also signalled that it might be necessary to turn back a
32:16bit.
32:16But that didn't happen.
32:20That was never a German problem. No one did that to the Germans. They did it to the others.
32:27I heard, oh, Andrei, we are such a big gas market, and Russians would not mess with it.
32:32The Kremlin has weaponized energy over the years in such a dramatic fashion, so many times, that it is astonishing
32:40that there had been no policy changes in Berlin or in Vienna or by other governments in Western Europe.
32:48The German strategy was not being adapted. It wanted more and more Russian gas, as cheaply as possible.
32:56We should be grateful that we had access to Russian gas and also to the gas fields. That will still
33:05be important in the long term.
33:07I mean, we must not forget that gas has been extremely cheap. So the Russian gas, I'll make an analogy
33:13now, is about as good as the discount store Aldi.
33:18At the beginning of 2009, Chancellor Angela Merkel wrote a letter to EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso in support
33:26of Nord Stream.
33:27A secure connection was needed. The problems with Ukraine have shown that again.
33:34Of course, it would have been possible to erect major barriers. And there have been phases of this. That's why
33:41things went so slowly. And that's why political support was very important in Europe.
33:47Gazprom persistently worked the EU. Construction stages of the pipeline were celebrated in a big way. At one of these
33:55celebrations, German EU energy commissioner Günther Oettinger gave the pipeline his blessing.
34:02Time and again, we actually had to intervene there and provide assistance. Above all, also work politically in Brussels. That's
34:10true.
34:11Gazprom alone was not able to do the lobbying. I mean, it's simply too far away. And you need European
34:17partners. Of course, we lobbied together.
34:24If you build a large wind farm in the North Sea today, you have similar issues to deal with.
34:31Sometimes shorter, sometimes longer.
34:34At the end of 2010, Putin made fun of the slow EU and the delayed approval of the pipeline in
34:41Berlin.
34:41Vladimir Putin.
34:56How do you want to actually heat? You don't want our gas nor nuclear energy. Do you want to heat
35:02with wood?
35:07And even for that, you'll have to go to Siberia.
35:13From his point of view, I'm sure that was a clue. You need me more than I need you.
35:18In that respect, you can always say, yes, there were enough indications that perhaps should have been taken more seriously.
35:25And yes, were not taken seriously to the extent that they perhaps should have been.
35:36Berlin on the same day, meeting in the evening in a restaurant.
35:43Putin and Warnich dined with the ex-Chancellor in a posh restaurant owned by Matthias Warnich's son.
35:54I don't know how many French presidents, how many British prime ministers have been photographed with Putin.
36:01Possibly also in restaurants in Paris.
36:04This debate, to say retroactively, yes, that should have been done at the time.
36:09And yet these photos document this special closeness.
36:12Everyone across Europe was happy that the Germans made sure there was a high level of energy security.
36:23The governments in Sweden and Finland were strongly against the pipeline due to environmental problems and also due to geopolitical
36:34problems.
36:35The Swedish military intelligence came out with a statement or warning saying that this pipeline could be used to spy
36:45on Sweden.
36:46Sweden used to get visits from Russian submarines.
36:51They were very concerned about that could happen again and that they could use Nord Stream, some of the platforms
37:00and the pipeline to actually to spy on Sweden.
37:06Ex-Chancellor Schröder came to work for Gazprom again.
37:09He contacted a man who was once prime minister of Sweden.
37:13Jörn Persson and Gerhard Schröder, they are old buddies.
37:17He was one of the first top-level politicians to talk about the climate crisis and hardly against lobbyism.
37:26In 2007, he received a phone call and Schröder invited him for lunch.
37:33After the lunch date, Jörn Persson went public and told that he has now signed as a consultant at the
37:41Public Affairs Bureau in Sweden linked up to E.ON, the German energy giant and one of the shareholders of
37:51Nord Stream.
37:53Gazprom also saw a need for action in Finland.
37:57Schröder took care of a top Finnish politician.
38:03They really needed a person to speak in their favour, a high-level person, and they found Pavel Lipponen.
38:11Lipponen led the Social Democrats in Finland and served as prime minister for eight years.
38:18Lipponen was invited to Berlin. He was received by Schröder and Matthias Warnig, the former Stasi captain.
38:26Lipponen became a paid lobbyist for Nord Stream.
38:29He was a key person. By meeting politicians in Finland to convince them that this is a very good thing
38:37for Finland and for Scandinavia and for whole Europe, we will secure the gas supply.
38:44So that was his task, to convince the Finnish government about that and the population. And he succeeded.
38:51Vladimir Putin could visit the pipeline construction site in the Finnish Gulf and showed the world that he was advancing
38:58towards Europe.
39:01It was very, very clever from the Russian side to recruit all the former top-level politicians and to fill
39:08their pockets.
39:09Were there any consequences?
39:11No way. They are living in the best way today.
39:17The pipeline could no longer be stopped. In September 2011, Putin and Schröder symbolically turned on the gas.
39:29At this point, Germany finally turned to gas because of the catastrophe that had occurred shortly before.
39:41The Fukushima disaster terrified not only Japanese but also European politicians into fear of the security of nuclear power.
39:58We will gradually phase out nuclear power completely by the end of 2022.
40:07At that time, we clearly said, OK, then we'll just have to invest more in coal and especially in gas.
40:14That design of the energy transition was all about gas.
40:20That created an enormous vulnerability for Germany and it would only accelerate the dependence on Russian gas.
40:30Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Angela Merkel, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.
40:35And then Nord Stream will play its part in ensuring that Europe has a secure gas supply in the future.
40:42In addition to Merkel, the French and Dutch prime ministers were invited.
40:46From now on, gas would flow through Nord Stream to Western Europe, while increasingly less gas would be piped through
40:53Poland and Ukraine.
40:55I would challenge you to find one example of how any of these pipelines or any of these energy deals
41:01with Russia made Russia more open, more democratic.
41:05It's never happened and it was never going to happen.
41:08And I think that German leaders knew this and went along with it anyways.
41:12Actually, I also think they knew what they were doing.
41:16Because I don't think, you see, it was naivete.
41:19It was greed.
41:21This basic attitude didn't change in the following years.
41:26German politicians made a pilgrimage to Russia.
41:33Saxony's Prime Minister Kretschmer signed a new gas contract in 2019.
41:39And lobbyist Schröder defended the next Russian pipeline.
41:43He left no doubt about who the opponents were.
41:48For months now, Danish policy has been jeopardizing the timely completion of the project.
41:54Because while construction is already underway in Russia, Sweden, Finland and also Germany,
41:59a permit from Denmark is still pending.
42:01And that has to do with political pressure from the US and, of course, Ukraine.
42:15Corruption is a strategic tool of the Kremlin.
42:18In many ways, it's how Russia's system works.
42:22In many ways, they're exporting how it works inside Russia.
42:26And I think they were surprised how easily it was imported into the West.
42:32A board seat, a very lucrative contract.
42:35When you consider what is at stake, a nation's energy security, a nation's national security,
42:42it's very cheaply purchased.
42:48You have the former Econ Minister of Austria being a senior advisor for Nord Stream 2 AG.
42:53You have former foreign minister of Austria, Karen Knysel, with whom Putin was invited to and she danced with at
43:01her wedding.
43:04Dear bride and groom, I congratulate you with all my heart on your marriage and formation of a new family.
43:13You have former French Prime Minister, Francois Fillon, nominated to not one but two Russian state-owned oil and gas
43:21trading firms.
43:22And the list goes on and on.
43:24There's one country Putin never lost sight of, Ukraine.
43:32Zurya Yayanti worked at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev and experienced Russian influence first-hand.
43:39A fair amount of the corruption in Ukraine is Russia as a malign actor and a malign influence.
43:45For example, in the gas sector.
43:48A Ukrainian played the leading role, Dmitry Fyrtash, the billionaire lived in exile in Vienna.
43:55He became rich through gas trading, partly because Gazprom offered him special conditions.
44:04Dmitry Fyrtash is one of the oligarchs of Ukraine.
44:08He has his fingers in every single cookie jar.
44:11He has media holdings, he has energy holdings.
44:14He became rich, among other things, by stealing from the Ukrainian gas sector and by siphoning off very large portions
44:22of the gas.
44:23Gazprom let him.
44:26Fyrtash denies illegal actions to this day.
44:29U.S. authorities want him extradited from Austria.
44:32Dmitry Fyrtash has been indicted by the U.S. government for bribery schemes.
44:36He has extremely strong connections to Russian-organized crime and to Putin.
44:43Aren't you afraid?
44:46If you want to lick honey, don't be afraid of the bees.
44:50Fyrtash has founded a company with Russian partners.
44:53Gazprom had over 160 subsidiary companies.
44:57Money could move around, change hands and you'd never be the wiser as to where it went.
45:02In my estimation, a lot of those companies existed so that they could take money off the books and buy
45:08politicians.
45:09And we all knew who was behind.
45:12It was established to give corrupt money to politicians.
45:16So they used the revenue from the gas to basically corrupt Ukraine and take money themselves.
45:22Yes.
45:23That's my assessment.
45:25In the early 2000s and even beyond that, the way that much of the gas was imported into Ukraine and
45:32then re-exported to Europe was through a very opaque company called Rosuk Energo, which had Russian and Ukrainian business
45:41people involved in it.
45:43Fyrtash supported the pro-Russian candidate Yanukovych. After his election victory, he was steering Ukraine in the direction of Russia
45:50in 2010.
45:52These people had political influence in Ukraine and some of them were clearly agents of Russia.
46:00It was very clear that Russia was using its money from Gazprom to influence Ukrainian politicians.
46:09And I long thought that just like the trade in gas corrupted Ukrainian politics, so it would corrupt German politics.
46:18Merkel wasn't backing away from Putin and Russia.
46:23I think this is the right thing to do. Europe and Russia are strategic partners that have certainly far from
46:30exhausted their potential for cooperation.
46:34After a constitutional amendment, Putin allowed himself to be elected president again.
46:39We won. We won. We won after an open and honest fight.
46:45On the day of Putin's third inauguration, tens of thousands of people protested in Moscow.
46:51Denouncing the president was corrupt, he brutally suppressed the protest.
46:58The West was telling itself its own stories.
47:01We didn't want to change our business, our behavior, our agenda.
47:05And Mr. Putin kept telling us, I'm going to disrupt you until you take my interests seriously.
47:12More and more Russian money was also flowing into destabilizing Ukraine.
47:17In 2013, the country was in a dangerous crisis when President Yanukovych had to decide whether to move closer to
47:26the EU.
47:34Janukovych came to a special summit of the European Union and he told us, the other side is offering more.
47:41And the European leaders told him, that's our limit, that's all you're going to get.
47:46And that made him say, then I won't sign the association agreement.
47:50That was what Putin wanted. The consequence of that was the Maidan.
47:57The spark was followed by an explosion. In the end, Yanukovych fled to Russia.
48:09In August 2015, I started at the U.S. Department of State as European Energy Security Advisor.
48:15I took over the job about a year after Russia legally invaded eastern Ukraine, the Donbas region, and purportedly annexed
48:23Crimea.
48:25The idea at the time was, Nord Stream 2 had been shelved.
48:28The idea that you would still build up this dependence on Russian energy was thought of as crazy.
48:36But less than a year later, Nord Stream 2 was back and the ghost of Putin's pipeline was once again
48:42haunting Europe.
48:43In September 2015, the contract for the construction of Nord Stream 2 was signed.
48:49I don't see a strategic trap there. I mean, the moment is very much marked by the war with Ukraine,
48:58which is bad, very bad, and really can't be justified with anything.
49:02But to say, because of that, we've been strategically trapped here, I think is overstated.
49:11Miller visited Berlin shortly before the Crimea annexation. He once again blamed Ukraine.
49:21Yes, Ukraine is in a deep political crisis. You still have to pay for the gas.
49:26And Miller had another surprise in store.
49:32Even I didn't think that Germany would be so naive as to sell Gazprom its storage capacity.
49:38In 2012, a BASF subsidiary agreed to this sale.
49:43At that time, this was all subject to approval, of course.
49:47The German state could have said, no, we don't want that. We want to have these storage facilities ourselves.
49:53But that didn't happen. On the contrary, we needed even more gas.
49:58Economics Minister Gabriel gave his blessing. In 2015, the storage facilities were sold.
50:04So that's where we got even more shares. We expanded those even further, got additional gas fields, and that was
50:11the goal.
50:12See you.
50:13Nord Stream 2 was pushed forward, just as Chancellor Angela Merkel and Vice-Chancellor Olaf Scholz wanted.
50:20I clearly, on a couple of occasions, saw the data which was prepared by Gazprom.
50:24Inside German ministries?
50:26Yes. And those people were top-ranked people in the German Ministry of Economy.
50:32That would mean minister and the state secretaries?
50:35Yes.
50:37They would?
50:37Very high.
50:40Propaganda had eaten deep into the system.
50:45Even during the Cold War, Russia was a reliable energy supplier.
50:51This is a purely economic, a purely commercial project.
50:55It's a private commercial project. I have German interests to represent.
51:01This project is not directed against any of our partners.
51:09I'm worried about Ukraine, because by shifting the gas transit, Putin is clearing the way for a large-scale military
51:18operation
51:19that will eventually lead to Russian tanks showing up on the eastern borders of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania.
51:31Excuse me for interrupting you, but do you really think this scenario is possible?
51:36Why did you say that?
51:38Because it is true.
51:40Gazprom is part of the Russian army. It's one of their weapons.
51:45Shortly before Putin ordered the attack on Ukraine, Nord Stream 2 was completed.
51:53Today, the second string of Nord Stream 2 must also be filled with gas.
51:59Seven months after the start of the attack on Ukraine, the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were blown up.
52:07One pipe remained intact.
52:12After all, it looks like one strand of Nord Stream 2 has remained intact.
52:17In a nutshell, the ball is now in the EU's court.
52:20Is the will there? Well, let them just turn on the tap.
52:23Whoever opens the 안에 now.
52:51Who is the
52:53You