Geopoliticians Upset by German CDU Head Laschet’s Non-Confrontational Views on Russia

Jan. 21 , 2021 (EIRNS)—“Where is Laschet’s denunciation of Navalny’s arrest?” referring to the newly elected Christian Democratic Union chairman Armin Laschet, demanded Green party MP Omid Nouripour, Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) quoted him as saying. “What Laschet has been missing for years, is to openly attack the war crimes [sic] of Russia and its handling of opposition figures like Alexey Navalny. Treating the Kremlin so selectively, will not enable him to keep Europe together.” Nouripour neglected to say why Russia should be attacked for saving opposition figure Navalny’s life when he collapsed in August on a flight to Moscow; the plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, and once he was stabilized medically, Moscow arranged to fly him to Berlin for more treatment.

SZ mentions that Laschet was a Western dissident when the world jumped on the British bandwagon to insist that Russia had poisoned former GRU Col. Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain with Novichok in March 2018. No concrete evidence was ever produced, despite the fact that Russia sought help from Britain’s government in the crime against Russian citizens. At the time, Laschet tweeted, “If one wants to force almost all NATO states into solidarity, one should have safe evidence, shouldn’t one?” He wrote, regardless of one’s personal views of Russia, “I have learned another conduct with states, in my studies of international law.”

Laschet was slandered as a “Putinversteher” in 2014, when he attacked the “demonization” of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin as being not “a policy but just an alibi for the absence of one.” In 2014, after Crimea reunited with Russia, Laschet criticized what he called “marketable anti-Putin populism” among German politicians. This year, when Navalny returned to Russia on Jan. 17, and was arrested in the Moscow airport, then-U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo jumped on it was an excuse to slap illegal sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany—hoping to force the EU to buy American LNG at higher prices. Laschet denounced the sanctions, disputing any connection between the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and the Navalny case—as of course there is none. As both SZ and London’s Financial Times observe, in 2014, his most “controversial foreign policy intervention” was his attack on the Obama Administration for backing Islamic State and Al Nusra Front terrorists against President Bashar al Assad’s Syrian government. In a tweet, he wrote: “Yes,Mr Kerry.But You supported ISIS and Al Nusra against President Assad in Syria.And they are financed by Qatar and Saudi-Arabia.”