Booted: Robert Habeck in May in Schwedt
Image: Reuters
They don’t want to have their necks twisted: in Schwedt/Oder, the townspeople are resisting the sanctions policy from Berlin. The mayor fears dramatic developments.
A city awaits its fate. Schwedt is in the far east of Germany on the Polish border. The fortunes of the city are closely linked to the oil refinery located there, which has been supplied with oil from Russia for decades through a pipeline with the promising name “Friendship”. By the end of the year, the federal government has decided that Germany will no longer purchase oil from Putin. Schwedt makes the decision like no other city in the country: twelve million tons of Russian crude oil are processed annually in the Schwedt PCK plant. 1,200 employees depend directly on Putin’s drip, and thousands more are linked to the refinery as suppliers. If you include family members, the city estimates that up to 10,000 people are at stake.
The state politicians deny responsibility. The federal government is to blame for this, so it must also take responsibility for it. A task force has been set up in the Economics Ministry, but nothing promising has been heard from it. When Minister Habeck spoke at a protest event in Schwedt at the end of June, he was hissed at. Citizens roared loudest when he predicted that Putin would soon be “less and less able to buy himself with the money we give him.” People in Schwedt didn’t want to believe or hear such half-strong sentences.