Click the tags above for all related articles
Thomas Bagger recently told Newsweek that the choice facing Poland was either “good relations in a European spirit or demanding reparations”.
Germany wants to be a “good neighbor” to Poland, but Poland’s ongoing reparations demands are a “mistake” and risk a future of mutual relations, Germany’s ambassador to Poland, Thomas Bagger, has claimed in a wide-ranging interview with Newsweek.
Berlin’s top diplomat in Warsaw covered issues including ongoing Polish-German relations, the demand by Warsaw for World War II reparations, and the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
On this last, Bagger admitted the construction of the gas pipelines connecting Germany with Russia “was a mistake.”
“From today’s perspective, there can be no doubt about that. After all, there is an intense public debate in Germany about this wrong political decision, but it is simply not true that only Germany bought energy from Russia,” Bagger told the news outlet, claiming that Poland too had transferred “billions of zlotys” to Moscow every year for Russian energy.
Bagger insisted that Germany wants to be a good neighbor for Poland even though this was not always the case in the past. He claimed that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought the two countries much closer in terms of their worldview, but not in the way most Germans expected.
“As we know, we haven’t always been (close). I believe that the Russian invasion of Ukraine led to a strategic rapprochement between the Polish and German ways of thinking about the world, but in a completely different way than many Germans expected,” Bagger said.