Matthias Warnig, Putin’s mole who subjugated Germany

When Gerhard Schröder and Vladimir Poutine dined together in Berlin on November 25, 2010 at the Café des Artistes, a third man, unknown to the general public, was at their table: Matthias Warnig. He is a former Stasi officer turned businessman. “I don’t like being in the front row or on the front page of the newspapers, he confided in 2018 to the Austrian daily. The press in a rare interview. It’s probably related to my background. My whole life remains marked by my activities at the Stasi.”

Discretion is second nature to him. And for good reason: Warnig is the only German oligarch of the Putin clan. Before the war in Ukraine, he was like a fish in water in Moscow and Berlin. His network of influence was immense. All doors were open to him. “In Berlin, I entered as I wanted to the Chancellery, Foreign Affairs or the Ministry of the Economy”, he confided in January to Stefan Willeke, journalist of the weekly The time, the only one to have approached him since the invasion of Ukraine. Formerly, the former spy was omnipresent in German circles of influence, even in the lodges of FC Schalke 04, the football club sponsored by the Russian giant Gazprom, on whose supervisory board he sat.

For a year, everyone has been running away from him. “I’m toxic,” he admits. Even his financial adviser, who manages his fortune of 25 to 30 million euros, wishes to distance himself to avoid the wrath of Washington. Because, because of his closeness to Putin, Warnig, 67, is the only German to appear on the list of American sanctions. “No one in Germany has been as close to the Russian president as him,” remarks Stefan Willeke.

Thanks to Warnig, Putin has woven a vast network of influence among the social democrats of the SPD. “Schröder plays the leading role in it”, explains Reinhard Bingener, co-author of The Moscow Connection (not translated). The rest of the cast is equally prestigious: Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the current President of the Republic; Sigmar Gabriel, ex-Minister of Economy and ex-president of the SPD; Brigitte Zypries, former Minister of Justice; Thomas Oppermann, former chairman of the parliamentary group in the Bundestag, or even the current Minister-President of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Manuela Schwesig, who defended, to the chagrin of the Americans, the “Putin gas pipeline”, Nord Stream 2, whose terminal arrives in its region.

More than a friend, a confidant

Warnig has known Putin for thirty years. They fished, hunted, skied together. More than a friend, he is a confidant, whom Putin invites, for example, to his father’s funeral in 1999, in strict privacy. Already in 1993, when Putin’s first wife was seriously injured in a car accident, Warnig organized her hospitalization in Germany and took in her daughter.

From the age of 18, Warnig joined the Ministry of State Security (Stasi). He joins the economic espionage service under the code name the economist (the economist), then Arthur. He is sent to Düsseldorf to spy on Krupp, Thyssen, BASF or even the Dresdner Bank, which, ironically, will have no qualms about hiring him after German reunification to clear the land to the east, in the ruins of the Soviet Empire. “The banks approached the former Stasi because of their knowledge of the field, recalls Hans Vorländer, political scientist from the University of Dresden. The administration was forbidden to them, but not the private sector. real estate.” But not Warnig, who is aiming higher.

In 1991, the Dresdner Bank entrusted him with the task of opening a subsidiary in Saint Petersburg, where he landed at the secretariat of Putin, then chairman of the committee for external relations of the city. He waits eight hours in the antechamber, armed with a thermos and sandwiches. “I’ll wait until the boss finds ten minutes,” he told the secretary. With Putin, who speaks German, the agreement is immediate.

Here is soon Warnig on the supervisory boards of the Rossiya bank, which finances the friends of Putin, and of Transneft, which owns 70,000 kilometers of pipelines. He chairs that of Rusal, at the time the largest aluminum producer in the world. Finally, he was appointed CEO of Nord Stream (two gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea), a consortium of which Gerhard Schröder chairs the supervisory board.

In power from 1998 to 2005, Schröder befriended Putin – “a pure democrat”, he said then – and opened the doors of his country to Gazprom by signing the two Nord Stream 1 and 2 contracts. this issue, Schröder ignored Europe and first defended the economic interests of Germany,” continues political scientist Hans Vorländer. The Chancellor ignores warnings from Ukrainians who keep telling him that Putin will use Nord Stream as a “weapon of war”.

Neither the annexation of Crimea, nor the war in Donbass, nor the poisoning of opponents caused Germany to deviate from its line: Russian gas above all! Manuela Schwesig goes so far as to create – based on an idea by Matthias Warnig – a screen foundation to circumvent American sanctions against Nord Stream 2. She even manages to finalize the construction of this second gas pipeline just before the start of the war. .

Those responsible for this risky strategy are still in office. But the “Moskau-Connection” could soon be accountable to a parliamentary commission of inquiry… which is however slow to see the light of day. “There are so many politicians involved, in the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Christian Democratic Union (Editor’s note: the CDU, Merkel’s party), that no one has any interest in talking,” laments Nina Katzemich, of the NGO LobbyControl, an independent observatory on the powers of influence and conflicts of interest. As for the East German spy Warnig, his days are peaceful, between pleasure trips to Spain and rest in his opulent house in the Black Forest, in the south of Germany… in the West.