In 1970, West German politicians and gas executives signed a landmark deal with the Soviet Union that would shape the next half-century of European energy policy. West Germany promised to supply the USSR with steel pipes, while in exchange the USSR would extend a gas pipeline to the border of West Germany and start pumping Soviet gas beneath the Iron Curtain and into Western Europe. The trade deal was one form of Ostpolitik—a wider policy of thawing relations between the USSR and West Germany that would earn then West German chancellor Willy Brandt the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971.
Brandt—who died in 1992—may not have imagined just how intertwined the
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