Shortly before the annexation of Crimea, German military officers were training Russians in how to wage war more effectively, while the defense giant Rheinmetall was planning a billion-euro deal with Russia, as recently revealed by Der Spiegel. Interestingly, at exactly the same time when Germany was becoming Putin’s “dream defense partner,” Donald Tusk’s pro-German government in Poland was also pursuing an unprecedented military rapprochement with Russia. Was this a mere coincidence in timing, or a coordinated operation aimed at creating an anti-American military triangle Berlin-Warsaw-Moscow? – asks Gazeta Polska.
According to Der Spiegel, citing a new book by investigative journalists Katja Gloger and Georg Mascolo, before 2014, Germany had intended to train the Russian army on a large scale. This cooperation was meant to address the poor condition of Russia’s armed forces, exposed during the 2008 war with Georgia. On Vladimir Putin’s orders, a “broad military modernization” was to begin, and Germany was to be the “dream partner” in this arms cooperation.
The then-government in Berlin, led by Angela Merkel, reportedly reacted to these proposals “with more than positive enthusiasm.” As retired General Josef Niebecker recalled:
“There was a political directive to respond favorably to Russian requests for cooperation and to fulfill them whenever possible.”
The centerpiece of this collaboration was to be the Bundeswehr’s ultramodern combat training center in Altmark, which the Russians wanted to replicate. How? On June 17, 2011, the German defense company Rheinmetall signed a contract worth about €135 million to build in Mulino, Russia, the first of eight planned training centers modeled after Altmark. As Rheinmetall proudly announced on its website at the time:
“By 2014, the world’s most modern training base with simulation technology will be built in the Volga region, capable of training up to 30,000 soldiers annually.”
According to documents disclosed by WDR Investigativ, the total value of these planned training centers was roughly €1 billion.
As Der Spiegel wrote, this “unprecedented” cooperation was so advanced that even joint German-Russian military exercises were being planned. It was only terminated after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in March 2014, when Berlin, under pressure from its allies, was forced to withdraw from these far-reaching projects.
On the Road to Strategic Partnership
The groundwork for this strategic partnership had already been laid in March 2009 during a session of the German-Russian Armaments Commission. According to documents reviewed by WDR Investigativ, key decisions regarding the training center project were made “largely with the participation of the Ministry of Defense.” At the time, the ministry was headed by Franz Josef Jung of the CDU, who, several years after leaving politics, joined the supervisory board of Rheinmetall.
The project received not only approval but also strong support from the German government. In June 2011, the then Russian defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov and Chief of the General Staff General Nikolai Makarov personally came to Germany to sign the contract with Rheinmetall – the same Makarov who also played a key role in earlier Polish-Russian military talks. Jung’s successor, Thomas de Maizière, enthusiastically continued this policy. During his visit to Moscow in September 2011, he declared euphorically:
“Our relations with Russia are not good – they are very good!”
He added that Germany was interested in a “modern, well-commanded Russian army.” His Russian counterpart Serdyukov spoke admiringly of the “tremendous potential for cooperation between Russia and Germany.”
Cooperation flourished at all levels. Russian generals regularly visited the German reference center in Altmark. In 2013, Russian officers came to Germany for training. In return, the Bundeswehr sent its soldiers for week-long stays in Mulino to “train Russian troops on site in new technologies,” as Rheinmetall documents stated. The German Ministry of Defense even planned to permanently assign German soldiers to Russia.
The collaboration went so far that joint German-Russian military exercises were planned for late July or early August 2013 and then again for 2014 at a training ground near St. Petersburg. Sixty German soldiers with Boxer armored vehicles were to take part. These plans, Der Spiegel recalls, were already causing “serious concern among NATO’s eastern flank allies.” But not everyone was alarmed, because, around the same time, a strikingly similar scenario was unfolding in Warsaw.
Tusk Government’s Twin “Reset”
While Berlin was deepening its military alliance with Moscow, Donald Tusk’s government in Warsaw pursued an almost identical policy. As revealed by Antoni Macierewicz’s subcommittee in the final Smolensk report, including the draft of a relevant document, just days before the Smolensk catastrophe, Poland was finalizing with the Russians an unprecedented military cooperation agreement.
Between March 22 and 24, 2010, a delegation of the Polish Armed Forces visited Moscow to prepare a draft communiqué on cooperation between the Armed Forces of the Republic of Poland and those of the Russian Federation. The document was to be signed in May 2010 in Warsaw during a visit by – none other than – General Nikolai Makarov, the same key figure in the German-Russian talks.
The scope of cooperation proposed by the Polish government was shockingly broad and largely aligned with the spirit of the German-Russian arrangements. According to the draft communiqué, Warsaw proposed to Moscow “the initiation (development) of areas of military cooperation in the following fields”:
- “working contacts between the military units of the Land Forces, Air Force, and Navy stationed in border areas”;
- “planning, conducting, and observing military exercises and training of troops and commands”;
- “planning and conducting peace support and crisis response operations, including engineering support in crisis response operations (…)”.
This proposed agreement was not an isolated act but part of a broader policy of “reset,” encompassing the military, special services, and the entire national security apparatus. Already in February 2010, Radosław Sikorski, writing in the German press, invited Russia to join NATO. Soon afterward, the Russian Federation leased a fenced, wooded holiday compound on Lake Zegrzyńskie in Skubianka (Mazovia Province). The Jabłonna Forest District leased the facility to Russian “diplomats” for 15 years – even though less than three kilometers away lay the Polish Armed Forces’ Communications and IT Training Center, surrounded by other key military facilities.
Soon thereafter, under General Janusz Nosek and with the formal approval of Prime Minister Donald Tusk in 2011, the Military Counterintelligence Service (SKW) signed a cooperation agreement with Russia’s FSB.
At the same time, the National Security Bureau (BBN) maintained exceptionally intensive contacts with Russian intelligence services. In May 2010, just a month after the Smolensk disaster, BBN chief Stanisław Koziej met in Moscow with Nikolai Patrushev, the former head of the FSB and secretary of Russia’s Security Council. This meeting marked the beginning of a series of consultations with one of Vladimir Putin’s most trusted lieutenants, responsible for coordinating the entire Russian security apparatus. Clearly, the planned military agreement with Russia was merely the culmination of a process designed to bind Poland to the Russian military and intelligence machine on an unprecedented scale.
The Military and Political Triangle
Interestingly, the same German defense minister, Franz Josef Jung, who in March 2009 laid the foundations for Germany’s strategic arms partnership with Russia, was at almost the same time engaged in talks to deepen military cooperation with Poland. In May 2008, during a meeting in Warsaw with then-defense minister Bogdan Klich, a decision was made to create a joint Polish-German battle group within the Weimar Triangle framework. In light of what we now know from Der Spiegel’s publications, this could have led to the emergence of a de facto military triangle Moscow-Berlin-Warsaw.
On one hand, Germany and Poland – both NATO allies – were planning a joint battle group; on the other, both Germany and Poland were, almost simultaneously and through the same General Makarov, negotiating unprecedented military cooperation agreements with Putin’s Russia that could have undermined the cohesion of the North Atlantic Alliance.
This military triangle had its political counterpart – the so-called Kaliningrad Triangle, a framework for cooperation between Berlin, Warsaw, and Moscow launched in February 2011 to “coordinate” the policies of these three states. As the Russian Foreign Ministry’s magazine International Affairs openly wrote in late 2011, the aim of this initiative was to unite forces to “counter American dominance on the European continent.”
The entire concept clearly carried an anti-American and anti-transatlantic thrust, fitting perfectly into Russia’s vision of a “Greater Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” It is worth recalling that at that very time, Germany was the main obstacle to Ukraine’s entry into NATO, while Donald Tusk’s government – unlike the Law and Justice (PiS) government of President Lech Kaczyński – obstructed the U.S. missile defense shield project in Poland.
The ideological foundations of this alliance are best captured by the words of the pro-Russian “geopolitician” Leszek Sykulski, one of the leading promoters of the Kaliningrad Triangle in Poland, who wrote in 2012:
“Polish diplomacy (including military diplomacy) should aim to integrate our country into the German-Russian initiative. Instead of scaring citizens with exercises such as ‘Zapad’ or ‘Ladoga,’ it would be better to cooperate closely in the military sphere with Germany and Russia.”