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.
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more: Germany wary over Donald Trump-Vladimir Putin meeting | Germany|
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