Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a comment: “We would like to declare that Berlin’s decision to stop the project will result in irreversible damage to Russian-German relations, which have been far from cloudless in recent years through no fault of ours. Responsibility for the consequences of these illegitimate actions, which call into question the reputation of Germany as a reliable foreign economic partner, rests entirely on the German side.”
“We believe this is a classic precedent of using the commercial project as the political weapon against us, which the collective West at large and official Berlin, in particular, are so fond of blaming Moscow for,” she added. “Now it is obvious that the German authorities were inconsistent and “succumbed to the temptation to use the project as a leverage of pressure on Russia, thereby showing their inability to separate politics and economics.”
