Senior official from Germany’s AfD meets top Kremlin associates

A senior official from Alternative for Germany (AfD) has met the boss of Gazprom and another close confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin, in some of the highest-level meetings between the far-right party and Kremlin associates since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Markus Frohnmaier, the AfD’s foreign policy spokesman, met Alexey Miller, chief executive of Russia’s energy giant Gazprom, during a visit to St Petersburg, where the German lawmaker will appear at Putin’s flagship economic forum.

Frohnmaier, who also serves as the AfD’s deputy leader in the Bundestag, also met Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and a special envoy for Putin. “Looking forward to building a great FUTURE together with AfD, Germany’s most popular party,” Dmitriev wrote on X.

The meeting comes as the AfD is leading national polls amid widespread dissatisfaction with Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who took office just over a year ago.

Frohnmaier said the focus of their talks was the idea of reopening the Nord Stream pipelines and resuming Russian gas supplies to Europe’s biggest economy. Three of the four pipelines that form Nord Stream 1 and 2 were damaged in a sabotage attack in September 2022, seven months after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Polling suggests the AfD will come first in elections in two eastern German states later this year, including in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the Nord Stream pipelines terminate. In neighbouring Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD appears within reach of winning an absolute majority and taking power.

Wednesday’s meeting between Frohnmaier and Miller was initiated by the German side, Gazprom said in a post on its Telegram channel on Wednesday. The parties discussed the energy situation in Europe, including what Gazprom said was “the lowest gas storage levels in Germany in five years”.

“Germany is stuck in a severe economic downward spiral, and a central driver is the high energy costs that make our entire economy more expensive, force companies to relocate, and burden citizens every day,” Frohnmaier wrote on social media after the meeting.

“Russia was the most important supplier of gas and oil. Therefore, all options must be put back on the table, including the restart of Nord Stream and the resumption of trade relations with Russia. Our task is to uncompromisingly place German national interests at the centre,” he added.

Germany was Europe’s largest importer of Russian gas before the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. One of the two Nord Stream 2 pipelines built between Russia and Germany — but never opened — was blown up in the sabotage attack that destroyed both pipelines of the older Nord Stream 1. The remaining Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which has an annual capacity of 27.5bn cubic metres, is undamaged but has never been used.

Repairing and recommissioning the Nord Stream pipelines was an official pillar of the AfD’s platform ahead of last year’s federal parliamentary elections. But the St Petersburg meeting was the first known meeting between a Gazprom official and a representative of the German far-right party, which also opposes sanctions on Moscow and sending military aid to Ukraine.

Dmitriev said in a post on X that his talks with Frohnmaier also covered “economic co-operation”, including “restarting the Russia-Germany-US business dialogue”.

Frohnmaier, who has courted close ties with figures close to US President Donald Trump and his Maga movement, is the most senior AfD lawmaker to have made a publicised visit to Russia in recent years. He was accompanied on his visit to St Petersburg by three other elected AfD officials.

Frohnmaier, who is scheduled to speak this week on a panel chaired by Dmitriev on the role of “soft power”, drew criticism from Merz’s government before the trip. But he said it was important to promote dialogue, adding that his participation in the economic forum did not represent “any endorsement of the war in Ukraine”.

Restarting gas flows through Nord Stream remains critical for Gazprom, Russia’s pipeline gas export monopoly, which has struggled to offset the huge decline of revenues from its European market.