What price a German chancellor?

Westerners whom Lenin uncharitably described as “useful idiots” were tricked and misled into championing his evil regime. Some were evil themselves, but most were indeed idiots, acting out of loyalty to a false ideology.

Many of today’s Western champions of Putin’s evil regime are paid, not misled. That makes them even more useful, but certainly less idiotic. They know which side their bread is buttered and act accordingly.

I have written about the morally (and possibly legally) dubious business dealings of many Western leaders with Putin’s gangsters and him personally. Trump and his retinue, the Clintons, the Bidens, Osborne, Mandelson and a few others have appeared in that context more than once.

Yet the evidence in most of those cases is circumstantial. No prima facie proof exists that, for example, Trump’s failure to say one bad word about Putin is linked with his pursuit of Russian business for decades. Nor can one prove that Osborne’s intimate contacts with the Russian gangster Deripaska had anything to do with his securing a post-parliamentary job as editor of a paper owned by a career KGB officer.

I may smell a giant rat there, but the odour comes from inference and conjecture, not the sort of evidence a court would regard as such. However, in the case of Germany’s former chancellor Gerhard Schröder no conjecture is necessary. Putin has bought him lock, stock and barrel.

The only remaining question is whether or not that transaction took place when Schröder was still chancellor (1998-2005). The answer depends on how one explains the statement Schröder made during his tenure, when he called Putin a “flawless democrat”.

If he genuinely thought so, one questions his sanity. If he didn’t think so, but said it anyway, one questions whether he acted as a free agent.

One way or the other, the moment he lost the election to Angela Merkel, Schröder was appointed to a series of highly lucrative positions in the Russian energy industry, culminating in his current chairmanship of Rosneft, the state oil monopoly. Gazprom, the state gas monopoly, also employs Schröder, as chairman of its Nord Stream project.

Both companies are at present under Western sanctions, but that means nothing to Schröder. Like Lenin’s useful idiots, he sold his soul to the devil. But, unlike them, he didn’t sell it on the cheap.

No one can rise to such heights in Putin’s Russia without pledging undying and unquestioning loyalty to Putin, both political and personal. Thus, in addition to lobbying Western leaders on behalf of Putin’s energy industry, Schröder shows the same allegiance in defending Putin’s crimes.

He vigorously protested against Western sanctions imposed after Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine. And he denied – against all evidence – Russia’s involvement in any assassination attempts, including the latest one against Alexei Navalny.

Such awful allegations against the flawless democrat Vlad, declared Schröder, are based on “no certain facts”. This is the line taken by the Kremlin and well rehearsed  in the Russian underworld. No evidence qualifies as a certain fact unless the murderer is photographed pumping bullets into his victim – or Putin’s signature appears on a published order to ‘whack’ Navalny.

Navalny, recovering from the poison he himself must have administered to give Putin a bad name, was understandably incensed.

In an interview published by the magazine Bild, he called Schröder Putin’s “errand boy” who receives “shadow payments” from Moscow. Yet Navalny was only half right.

Putin’s errand boy Schröder undoubtedly is. He might just as well have been called a stooge, puppet or flunkey, but that’s a matter of semantics, not substance. However, the second accusation was phrased loosely.

There’s nothing “shadow” about the millions Schröder is paid by the Kremlin. No Judas, he. Schröder takes his pieces of silver openly, avidly and proudly, the labourer worthy of his hire. Of course, any money anyone receives from the Kremlin is ipso facto not just shadowy but excremental, but that’s not the evidence one can take to court.

This isn’t a figure of speech. For Schröder, fortified by Putin’s filthy lucre, is suing Bild for the adjective Navalny used. As he announced:

“I therefore feel compelled to take legal action against the publisher who has violated my personal rights in the most serious way. The same will happen to other media if they take over and spread the false allegations spread by Bild–Zeitung.”

Putin’s poodle has barked like a mastiff, but any competent barrister can defang his case. I’m sure Schröder will end up paying millions in court costs, but thanks to Putin, his frequent partner in foreplay, he can afford it.

How many other Schröders are indeed lurking in the shadows, I wonder. How many Western politicians and pundits take Putin’s rouble secretly to shill for him openly? It would be easy enough to find out, given the will. Alas, the will is nowhere in evidence.