Since leaving office in November 2005, the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder has made a point of not commenting on his successor Angela Merkel’s government. In particular, he has avoided criticising her foreign policy—not least because his former chief of staff Frank-Walter Steinmeier is now foreign minister in Merkel’s coalition. However, since the outbreak of the Caucasus conflict in August, Schröder has broken his silence to criticise Georgia, the US, Nato—everyone, in fact, except Russia. In an interview with Der Spiegel, he made it clear that he regarded Georgia as the aggressor, dismissed fears about a new cold war, and rejected the idea that the EU should freeze talks on a strategic partnership with Russia. Astonishingly, he even declined to call for Russia to pull out of Georgia.

At the end of August 2008, on the day after Russia recognised the independence of the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, I met Schröder in his office on the fourth floor of the Bundestag building directly opposite the Russian embassy on Unter den Linden in Berlin. With his back to the window and the Russian flag flying above his head, he reiterated his anger at the west’s actions, but had not a bad word to say about Russia. “Germany is doing what it can to save what can be saved, but I am concerned at how carelessly Nato is gambling away its strategic partnership with Russia,” he said as he puffed away on a Cohiba. The way Schröder sees it, he made great progress as chancellor in building a close relationship with Russia—an equivalent, almost, of the historic reconciliation between West Germany and France under Konrad Adenauer. This is now being undermined by Merkel, who has been more critical of Russia in public than Steinmeier.

Even in office, Schröder, whose father was killed fighting the Red army in the second world war, was conspicuously pro-Russian. He developed a close personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, whom he famously described as a “flawless democrat” while glossing over the war in Chechnya and the suppression of political rights in Russia. Just two weeks before the German election in September 2005, Schröder and Putin signed a deal to build a Baltic sea gas pipeline that would run from Russia to Germany, bypassing Poland. Then, in December 2005—shortly after leaving office—he became the chairman of the board of Nord Stream, the consortium set up to build the pipeline, which is controlled by the Russian energy group Gazprom.

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