The recent refusal of Poland to extradite a Ukrainian citizen suspected of involvement in the Nord Stream submarine pipeline explosions reopens a complex chapter in European energy geopolitics.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk stated that Warsaw does not intend to hand over Volodymyr Z. to Germany, reiterating that the real problem is not the attack on Nord Stream 2, but its very construction.

A position that is not only judicial, but strategic: Tusk calls into question the entire European energy policy of the last fifteen years.

A gradual submission

On 8 November 2011, Angela Merkel, beaming, inaugurated the Nord Stream in Lubmin, together with Medvedev, Fillon and Rutte. It was the symbol of a Europe that (despite the invasion of Georgia three years earlier) still thought it could build peace through gas.

But that vision – shared by Berlin, Paris and the overwhelming majority of the European elite – turned into a strategic mistake.
Giants like Snam, Saipem, GDF-Suez and Rolls-Royce participated in the construction, in the name of a realpolitik that closed its eyes to the authoritarian drift of the Kremlin.

All this while the radical environmentalist movements – some of them fostered by the gas lobbies – were agitating across the continent to have the atomic power stations shut down and were reporting incredible successes in Italy, Germany, Belgium and Spain, all to the benefit of the Moscow tycoons.

To further consolidate Europe’s dependence on Russian gas, bypassing Eastern transit countries and cutting off Kiev (which had already suffered from the invasions of Crimea and Donbass), Nord Stream 2 was then built.
Warsaw, Vilnius and Riga denounced it from the start as a direct threat to continental security. Today, Poland considers that pipeline a monument to Western European connivance, built with Russian capital and German funds in an illusion of economic balance that ended up favouring Moscow.

The 2022 explosions in the Baltic Sea marked the end of that illusion: there is no longer a separation between economics and geopolitics, if there ever was one.

And still Merkel defends her choices

Yet there are still those who regret that era of self-interested complicity in Putin’s crimes, as if the events of the last three years were just an unfortunate accident.
Even a few days ago Merkel described 2021 as the year when ‘Putin no longer took the Minsk agreement seriously’ (which he had in fact already broken several times in 2015), explaining that she had tried a new form of dialogue with him.

In an interview with the Hungarian media Partizán, the former chancellor said that the proposal for direct negotiations between the EU and Russia, supported by Macron, was blocked by Poland and the Baltic countries (from which Russia, in those self-styled ‘negotiations’, demanded that all NATO troops be withdrawn, turning them into helpless prey).
No wonder those countries now call the former chancellor’s position ‘unbelievable’, accusing her of playing ‘Putin’s game’.

There is no turning back

Merkel’s recent interview shows the distance between two Europes: that of condescension and that of deterrence .

Tusk, today, represents its counterpoint.

His phrase – ‘the problem is not that Nord Stream 2 was blown up, but that it was built ‘ – sums up the political lesson of the present: the real crime was not the destruction of the pipeline, but the illusion that it could guarantee stability to a Europe that had chosen, when looking at Russia, not to see what really existed but what it was convenient for it to see.