Berlin. “Putin’s Power” is the title of the latest book by Hubert Seipel that has just been published, in which the journalist investigates the “Operation Keeping in Power” (chapter heading) as well as the relationship between Angela Merkel and Russia’s President or the question “Why Europe needs Russia” (subtitle) . Seipel (70) worked as a foreign correspondent for “Stern” and “Spiegel” and in 2012 shot the documentary “Ich, Putin” for ARD. In 2015 his book “Putin – Inside Views of Power” was published. The RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND) spoke to the Russia and Putin connoisseur.
Mr. Seipel, US President Joe Biden replied in an interview with the ABC television station, when asked whether he thought Putin was a murderer, “yes, I do”. What do you make of it?
The interviewer asked a leading question and the interviewee started it. I think the moderator, a former Clinton press secretary, was aware of this several things pronounced. The Russian president is considered the epitome of evil in the United States, and the Democrats have an old deal with Vladimir Putin.
According to the Democrats, Donald Trump only won the 2016 elections against their candidate Hillary Clinton because Putin supported him. From the point of view of the Republicans, Putin still represents the old Soviet Union, the enemy who threatens the USA from outside and who can best be blamed for one’s own mistakes.
You quote Putin as saying that he knows that Russophobia continues to determine US foreign policy. Is that so?
It was US President Ronald Reagan who dubbed Russia the “Empire of Evil” in the 1980s. And since he took office in 2000, Vladimir Putin has held the role of evil from the service, about which the media has been writing obituaries for years. Sometimes he has Parkinson’s, then he has cancer, then depression. Hardly anyone has been pronounced dead that often, and he’s still there.
And it disturbs the Americans in their belief that they are special, endowed with the task of ordering the world. The bad guy in this game is traditionally Russia. And now China has also joined. On the other hand, America is well aware that it needs Russia. After all, right at the beginning of his term in office, Biden signed the “New Start” nuclear disarmament treaty with Putin, which his predecessor had terminated shortly before. Although Russia is far inferior economically, it is the largest nuclear power in the world.
The relationship is massively tense, you write that the Kremlin is hoping for “imperial overstretching”, that is, that the Americans will overwhelm themselves with the claim to want to manage everything worldwide.
The US has the largest military budget in the world at over $ 700 billion, more than twelve times that of Russia. At the same time, Beijing has risen to become Washington’s serious economic rival. With its politics, the West is pushing Russia more and more towards Beijing, although Moscow does not necessarily want that.
Americans have massive problems at home. About 50 percent of workers earn $ 18,000 a year, living on the edge of the subsistence level. Biden has announced that he will be investing trillions in the ailing infrastructure of the United States. Trump is gone, but the two camps, which do not want to know anything about each other, have not shrunk. Although he lost, he achieved the second highest result in absolute terms that an American president has ever achieved. In other words, there is a lot to be done in terms of domestic policy, which can lead to overstretching in terms of foreign policy.
Joe Biden’s son Hunter has just published a book and made headlines with a “drug confession” on the boulevard. He also plays a role in your book.
Shortly after the fall of the government in Kiev in 2014, Barak Obama gave his Vice President Joe Biden the job of looking after Ukraine’s integration into the West. Shortly thereafter, Biden’s son Hunter became a board member of the largest private Ukrainian gas company Burisma, with a salary of $ 50,000 a month.
Hunter had no experience in the gas business or anything to do with Ukraine. At some point in Kiev, the Attorney General Viktor Schokin began to investigate Burisma because of the company’s crooked financial transactions, and Joe Biden made a billion-dollar loan from the International Monetary Fund dependent on Schokin being dismissed. He was actually fired and the investigation was closed.
It was a classic conflict of interest, or to quote the Washington Post, “normal nepotism.”
Back to Putin – how long is he going to do it and who will come next?
Nice question. Nobody knows that. At the beginning of last year, Putin was officially in the second half of his final term. In short, in this uncomfortable situation, which the English term “Lame Duck” sums up. Potential successors gather their troops, position themselves and the struggle to determine who will succeed paralyzes the government and the bureaucracy.
We are currently seeing that with Angela Merkel. Putin has played out the competition for now. Thanks to a successful constitutional amendment, he can now theoretically stay in office until 2036. I don’t think that’s going to happen. However, he now has the chance to shape his exit himself and thus to influence the time afterwards.
You write that under Trump, Angela Merkel sought more closeness to Putin, what is the relationship between the two of them?
For Angela Merkel, as one of her biographers described it, America is the epitome of freedom, the goal of longing. The matter got its first crack when it was discovered that Obama’s NSA was tapping into the German Chancellor’s cell phone. Merkel’s stunned criticism – “wiretapping among friends, that doesn’t work” – marked the first crack in her belief in her big brother.
And then there was the gruff appearance of Trump and his crusade against the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea pipeline. For Angela Merkel, the basic business security of the Federal Republic, which she had politically considered earthquake-proof, was lost. It was the bitter, albeit not new, realization that the great power USA is exclusively pursuing its own interests. In this context, Merkel took another step towards Putin.
What are you up to?
Let’s stay with Nord Stream 2: After the Ukraine debacle in 2015, there was an agreement between Putin and Merkel. If Russia does not cut the transit line for Russian gas through Ukraine to Europe, then Germany will push through the construction of the gas pipeline through the Baltic Sea.
Ukraine continues to receive billions in transit fees that it urgently needs. And Germany benefits from cheap direct imports of natural gas from Siberia. And this deal was extended shortly before the Chancellor’s visit to Moscow in January 2020.
Does that mean that Putin and Merkel get along quite well after all?
Conditionally. At the subsequent meeting in the Kremlin, they both looked more like an elderly couple who had been divorced for years and can now discuss maintenance payments with due distance. You are still on your toes, you know each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
Nobody from the West talks to Putin more often than Merkel. The fact that a former FDJ secretary from East Germany is talking to a former KGB officer of the Soviet Union about peace in Europe is an ironic twist in history.
In the case of the poisoned Kremlin critic Alexej Navalny, Angela Merkel has again clearly positioned herself against Putin.
That’s true. She spoke of “dismaying information” and declared Putin to be the main suspect without naming him. Literally she said: “There are now serious questions that only the Russian government can and must answer.”
But wasn’t she right about that?
Can be, can not be. The evidence is by no means as clear as it is written. Take the poison, which supposedly can only come from Moscow. The neurotoxin Novichok, developed in Russia, came into the hands of the BND as early as the 1990s through a defector, which shared the findings with the allies.
The head of the Russian laboratory that developed the deadly substance has lived in the United States since 2001 and has written a long book about it. Russia no longer has an exclusive monopoly on Novichok.
So you don’t believe that Navalny was poisoned by the Russian secret service at Putin’s orders?
There are many unanswered questions. Was it really Putin who gave the order? Why then is Putin letting him travel to Germany for treatment if his goal is to kill him? Navalny has also attacked many rich Russians with his anti-corruption organization. There are a lot of bills open.
In any case, so far there is no concrete evidence. But in the political business the old principle “In case of doubt, for the accused” does not apply anyway. And certainly not for the enemy of Vladimir Putin.
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