Ms. Merkel’s spokesman condemned the Navalny arrest on Monday and called for his immediate release, but said it had no bearing on the pipeline agreement. “The German government position on the Nord Stream 2 project is that it is an economic endeavor,” the spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said. “That has not changed.”
The pipeline is being built by Nord Stream AG, a company owned by the Kremlin-controlled gas giant Gazprom. It is 94 percent complete, but construction on the project was halted in December 2019 after several European companies abandoned it following an initial threat of sanctions.
Nord Stream AG had no immediate comment on the new sanctions.
Berlin insists that Germany needs additional natural gas as a bridge energy supply to complete its ambitious project to phase out coal and nuclear power as it develops renewable energy sources.
Even German opponents of the long-disputed pipeline project were furious that the Trump administration would use the same punitive measures against a wholly European project as they would against companies doing business with sanctioned countries like North Korea or Iran.
No German companies will be directly affected by the sanctions against the ship, the Fortuna, and the Russian company that owns it, KVT-RUS. But any companies that do business with the ship or its owner, whether a port that provides servicing or an insurer, risk losing access to the U.S. financial system. According to ship-tracking data, the Fortuna is still anchored in the Baltic Sea near Rostock, in northern Germany, Reuters reported.