BOUGHT AND PUTIN-PAID FOR: Who is Nord Stream’s Matthias Warnig, Putin’s friend from East Germany? “Matthias Warnig is, in various ways, an exceptional person. The 65-year-old is the oldest German friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the most active German in Russian business circles. He is a former Stasi agent who became a banker in the 1990s. Since then, he has sat on the supervisory boards of numerous German-Russian banks and companies. He is currently the CEO of Nord Stream 2, and happens to play a part in the latest YouTube video by Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), in which Russian opposition activists uncover an extensive network of corruption around the construction of a palatial estate for the Russian president on the Black Sea coast.”

Meanwhile, I suspect that rather a lot of German politicians are on Putin’s payroll. Both China and Russia seem to have discovered that it’s easier and cheaper to buy off the West’s corrupt, feckless ruling class than to wage traditional war.