AfD representative met with Gazprom chief in St. Petersburg

Markus Frohnmaier, the foreign policy spokesman for the Alternative for Germany party, held a meeting with Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller during a visit to St. Petersburg, where the German MP participated in Putin’s economic forum.

This was reported by the Financial Times.

According to the outlet, this is one of the highest-level meetings between the far-right party and Kremlin associates since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Frohnmaier, who also serves as deputy leader of the party’s parliamentary group in the Bundestag, met during the same visit with Kirill Dmitriev — the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and Putin’s special envoy.

“Looking forward to building a great future together with AfD — Germany’s most popular party,” Dmitriev wrote on X.

The meeting between Frohnmaier and Miller, which took place on Wednesday, was initiated by the German side — Gazprom announced this on its Telegram channel. The parties discussed the energy situation in Europe, in particular what Gazprom described as “the lowest level of gas reserves in Germany in the past five years.” Frohnmaier noted that the talks centered on the idea of resuming the Nord Stream pipelines and reviving Russian gas supplies to Europe’s largest economy.

“Germany has found itself in a severe economic downward spiral, and one of the main factors is high energy costs, which are making our entire economy more expensive, forcing businesses to relocate production, and burdening citizens every day,” Frohnmaier wrote on social media after the meeting.

Three of the four pipelines making up Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 were damaged in a sabotage attack in September 2022 — seven months after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Prior to that, Germany had been Europe’s largest importer of Russian gas.

Repairing and resuming operation of Nord Stream was part of AfD’s official election platform ahead of last year’s federal parliamentary elections. The party also opposes sanctions against Moscow and military aid to Ukraine. The St. Petersburg meeting was the first known meeting between a Gazprom representative and an AfD representative.

UNIAN previously reported that, according to exit polls, AfD came first in elections in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, for the first time since World War II coming to the threshold of taking power at the state level. Party co-chair Alice Weidel called the result “historic,” saying it gave the party a clear mandate to govern. Politico, for its part, noted that the elections held no positive outcomes for Chancellor Friedrich Merz — only political humiliation of varying degrees. Within the CDU, which Merz leads in addition to his role as chancellor, talk of replacing him has been ongoing for several months.