From Russia With Love
Vladimir Putin visited Berlin yesterday to give his old friend Gerhard Schröder a boost during the last days of an election battle -- and to sign a deal for a new gas pipeline that leaves Poland out in the cold.

Gerhard Schröder and Vladimir Putin have always been pals. Putin, for one thing, speaks fluent German (he used to run a KGB bureau in Dresden). Russia also sells a lion's share of oil and natural gas to Germany; and it's just good politics for the German chancellor to be seen smiling and shaking hands with the Russian president, papering over a bad century of German-Russian relations. So it was no surprise when Vladimir dropped in on Gerhard this week -- during an election campaign -- to cinch a deal for a new natural gas pipeline from Russia's Baltic coast to Germany.

One problem, though: the pipe will run along the ocean floor. In the old days, pipelines from Russia to East Germany were built overland during (or just after) the Cold War, as a sign of friendship within the Communist bloc. Those days are apparently gone. The new undersea gas line will skip Poland and Ukraine and Belarus -- along with the land rent and transit fees those nations might normally charge. Poland, for one, is howling, and Germany's newspapers sympathize.

"Schröder's commitment to the Baltic-Sea route is above all a favor to his friend Vladimir Putin," writes the Financial Times Deutschland, which points out that the economics don't make a sense. "The overland route through the Baltics would have been cheaper, as managers for participating [German] firms Eon and BASF well know." The paper doesn't see much political risk in running a pipe through westernizing nations like Ukraine or Poland, and thinks they have a right to feel snubbed. "The pipeline contract signed yesterday in Berlin is being called the 'Schröder-Putin Pact' in the Polish media," the editors note -- "a bitter play on the 'Hitler-Stalin Pact' of 1939 that led to the carving up of Poland."

The left-leaning Berliner Zeitung punctures Schröder's inflatable love for Putin by listing signs of dictatorship in Moscow which the German leader prefers to ignore. "He had nothing to say about the election farce in Chechnya, even after the EU condemned it; he rightly alienated George Bush for the war in Iraq but threw in with Putin, who's waged a dirty war in his own nation; he even called Putin a 'flawless democrat' even after [business tycoon and political opponent Mikhail] Khodorkovsky was sidelined in an election." The paper plays on Putin's past by describing his government system in Russia as a hypothetical East Germany "taken over by the secret police after the fall of Communism."

The only newspaper to mention the pipeline's environmental impact is the left-liberal Tageszeitung, which also sounds underwhelmed by Schröder's new agreement. Not only will the pipeline irritate Poland, writes the paper; it's also an ecological pain in the rear. "A rupture on land can be located fairly quickly, but pipeline damage underwater might go undiscovered for days."

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung argues that the dream of cheap natural gas, which will be important in future generations if the price of oil keeps rising, is a fallacy. Natural gas comes cheaper than heating oil, traditionally, but Russia's gas monopoly, Gazprom, keeps prices high for European export. And Gazprom is one of the most important natural-gas providers in the world. "It's unrealistic for certain German politicians to think they can convince Russia to unlink the price of natural gas from the price of oil," writes the SZ. By "certain politicians" the paper means not just Schröder, but also his opponent Angela Merkel, who also met Putin on his swing through town.

Die Welt believes Germany needs alternatives to oil from the Middle East, but worries the pipeline might make Berlin too dependent on Moscow. (Germany already buys about a third of its natural gas from Russia.) The center-right paper faults Schröder for "fluttering his eyelashes" at Putin and shamelessly cutting Poland, in particular, out of the massive trade between Siberia's gas fields and the European Union. "A new German leadership will have to work hard to smooth the Poles' ruffled feathers," write the editors. "But it will have to be done, for our interests as well as theirs."