"This is not the Red Army"

Vladimir Putin united Bavarian capitalists with Russian ones

Vladimir Putin, who was supposed to move from Dresden to Munich yesterday morning, could not easily part with the city where he spent his years of service and where his first daughter was born. Having risen early in the morning, the Russian president, accompanied by several security guards, went on an unplanned (but, apparently, long-planned) walk around the city. I wasn’t walking along a tourist route, but along some kind of my own route. I drank coffee in a street cafe, read the newspaper, and talked to construction workers passing by. Then he came to the Frauenkirche - the famous Dresden Cathedral, destroyed during the Second World War by Allied aviation. It was recently completely restored with the active participation of Vladimir Putin’s longtime friend, Matthias Warnig, who now heads the company building the Nord Stream gas pipeline. The cathedral was closed, but upon seeing the Russian president, the Frauenkirche minister let Putin in and showed the renovated church from the inside.

The walk lasted a full hour and a half, as a result of which all the events of the Munich program were postponed.

In the capital of Bavaria, the president dealt with economic problems. This is natural: Munich is the largest industrial, scientific and technological center in Germany, where the headquarters of companies such as Siemens and BMW are located. Every fourth German company operating in Russia comes from Bavaria. Vladimir Putin held talks with Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber, met with the heads of scientific and technological centers and addressed two hundred Munich entrepreneurs. It should be noted that all these meetings turned out to be truly “free of politics.” The Bavarians greeted Putin very kindly and preferred to talk about investments rather than about events such as the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. When he (very late) arrived for a meeting with entrepreneurs at the Bayerischer Hof Hotel, he was greeted with almost an ovation.

Putin happily told them that gas from the Shtokman field would go to Germany, that there were practically no zones in the Russian economy closed to foreign investors, and that the West in no way needed to be afraid of Russian investors. “Those who are coming to you now are not the Red Army, but capitalists just like you,” he said. Delight was caused by Putin’s remark that Russia and Germany are destined to be the closest partners: “Russland and Deutschland even sound almost the same!”

Andrey DENISOV, Dresden--Munich