My first car was a Lada. The fact that the gaps between the two doors were not the same was a gift. That sometimes in the morning after parking there was a small oil stain under the car, customary in the country, is still driving. Wading through a layer of oil when visiting the workshops of Russian machine builders is not worth mentioning. Now, however, alleged oil leaks are becoming a major political issue. First, an oil leak was found in July at a Russian terminal through which Kazakhstan ships crude oil west. The plant was shut down for a month.
Very few people know whether the leak exists at all, despite the photo posted on the Gazprom channel on Telegram. The liquid that looks like soy sauce can be anything or any other place. Such a forum proves just as little as the photo posted on Saturday morning of an employee with an alarm yellow jacket and the inscription “Siemens Energy”.
Gazprom claims that the Munich-based turbine builder and producer of the at least eight turbines used to operate the two strands of the NordStream1 pipeline is on site with staff. “Siemens is involved in the repair work under the current contract, finding faults, reporting oil leaks and standing ready to fix them. Only there is no place to repair it.” Gazprom wrote this on Telegram in the morning. The reaction from Munich: zero. The Gazprom message was picked up by TV stations, radio stations, websites and newspapers around the world.
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When asked, a Siemens Energy spokesman said: “We have taken note of the latest reports on the leak”, the company’s statement from the previous evening applies, according to which Siemens Energy is currently not commissioned with maintenance work, but is ready.
>> Read also: Comment: Siemens Energy contradicts Russia’s turbine saga – it was overdue
The Siemens Energy statement also said: “Such leaks do not normally affect the operation of a turbine and can be sealed on site.” I had heard similar things after buying my Lada. And the Federal Ministry of Economics also reacted extremely strangely on Friday evening to Gazprom’s presumed pretext for permanently turning off the Baltic Sea pipeline: “We have taken note of the latest reports from Gazprom. We are not commenting on the matter, but we have already seen Russia’s unreliability in the past few weeks and accordingly we have unwaveringly and consistently continued our measures to strengthen independence from Russian energy imports.”
This communication disaster is damaging Germany as an industrial location. After such statements and without energetic intervention by politicians and companies against obvious lies by Gazprom, who should still have confidence abroad in the reliability of German products? – Goods that always had the reputation of being expensive but technically better and that they could be repaired quickly in the event of a breakdown. Haven’t the federal government and the Munich group received the wake-up call that we’re in the middle of an information war? And that, despite the obvious lies of the Kremlin and its corporation, Germany is about to lose it?
Stand up against fear
Where is the otherwise expressive Minister Robert Habeck, who emphasizes in front of the cameras that Gazprom keeps coming up with new reasons why Nord Stream 1 allegedly cannot be filled. A turbine that was freshly serviced in Canada but not picked up by Gazprom has been standing at the Siemens Energy plant in Mülheim for a month. All of the required eight turbines are now said to have failed in parallel, while Gazprom is not reporting any compressor or turbine failures anywhere else in the country? Where are the clear words from Habeck and the management of Siemens Energy to clearly reject this.
Remarkably, Vladimir Putin is always looking for a pretext for his actions. Because he wants to win over the international public: politicians and the public in India, Abu Dhabi, Kenya – to get his point of view across: We are not the cause of war and conflicts, but the West. With the storm of SS men disguised as Polish troops on the Gleiwitz transmitter, Adolf Hitler already claimed that Poland had attacked and that Reich Germany had only “shot back”. Putin’s force continues to do just that to this day.
This war propaganda is known and transparent. It is surprising why Germany is currently so poorly prepared for the PR attacks from Moscow. It is incomprehensible why statements by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov or Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, about whom one can no longer even count how often they have lied, are still broadcast on the tickers of Western news agencies.
When will they in Berlin and Munich finally understand that in the information war you have to play hard and immediately reject every propaganda lie? When will news writers understand that information from Moscow can only be published after careful scrutiny and not shamefully added with the postscript that it cannot be independently verified.
Putin is a Soviet-type politician, he belonged to the secret service KGB and to this day uses the means with which the Soviet leadership ruled the people between St. Petersburg and the Pacific: ANGS T. Because fear is paralyzing. The people of the USSR were so afraid for their lives that they fell silent. In the West, Putin is now spreading the fear of winter: the fear of cold apartments, idle factories, unbaked bread. Fear eats the soul is the title director Rainer Werner Fassbinder chose for a cinematic masterpiece. Only those who free themselves from fear can face dictators like Putin with backbone and head held high.
More: Gazprom allegedly finds oil leak – and stops deliveries via Nord Stream 1