Germany will be watching keenly when the mercurial US president meets
his Russian counterpart on Monday. Germans are concerned on three
counts: NATO, Crimea and the Nord Stream gas pipelines.;\,
The German government's commissioner on Russian affairs, Dirk Wiese, isn't commenting on Donald Trump's meeting on Monday in Helsinki with Russia's Vladimir Putin. But he and many other German leaders will be carefully, perhaps nervously, monitoring the talks between the two presidents.
Trump has made it something of a habit of late to single out Germany for criticism and any signs of agreement between him and Putin would further fray nerves in Berlin. Germany is particularly concerned about three issues.
Trump has sought to use at least the implicit threat of the United States scaling back its military presence in Europe to pressure NATO members to spend more on defense. That, according to Gwendolyn Sasse, the Academic Director of Berlin's Center for East European and International Studies, has contributed to "a visual rupture in the relationship between the EU and the US."
Germans want Trump to act as a leading NATO member and not as a free agent when he sits down with Putin.
"I hope that Trump's allies at the NATO summit showed him some lines he shouldn't cross in his relations with Russia," Rebecca Harms, a Green member of the European Parliament and a leading Putin critic, told Deutsche Welle.
Germans are under no doubts that Putin, for his part, is pursuing what Harms terms "a long-term aggressive, anti-European policy" and is trying to drive a wedge between the US and its European allies.
Read more: Germany wary over Donald Trump-Vladimir Putin meeting | Germany| News and in-depth reporting from Berlin and beyond | DW |
The German government's commissioner on Russian affairs, Dirk Wiese, isn't commenting on Donald Trump's meeting on Monday in Helsinki with Russia's Vladimir Putin. But he and many other German leaders will be carefully, perhaps nervously, monitoring the talks between the two presidents.
Trump has made it something of a habit of late to single out Germany for criticism and any signs of agreement between him and Putin would further fray nerves in Berlin. Germany is particularly concerned about three issues.
Trump has sought to use at least the implicit threat of the United States scaling back its military presence in Europe to pressure NATO members to spend more on defense. That, according to Gwendolyn Sasse, the Academic Director of Berlin's Center for East European and International Studies, has contributed to "a visual rupture in the relationship between the EU and the US."
Germans want Trump to act as a leading NATO member and not as a free agent when he sits down with Putin.
"I hope that Trump's allies at the NATO summit showed him some lines he shouldn't cross in his relations with Russia," Rebecca Harms, a Green member of the European Parliament and a leading Putin critic, told Deutsche Welle.
Germans are under no doubts that Putin, for his part, is pursuing what Harms terms "a long-term aggressive, anti-European policy" and is trying to drive a wedge between the US and its European allies.
Read more: Germany wary over Donald Trump-Vladimir Putin meeting | Germany| News and in-depth reporting from Berlin and beyond | DW |
