AfD official meets Putin adviser, calls for Nord Stream reopening

Markus Frohnmaier turned a Kremlin showcase into a political stress test for Germany’s firewall against Russia, meeting Gazprom chief Alexei Miller and Vladimir Putin’s special envoy Kirill Dmitriev in St. Petersburg and calling for the Nord Stream pipeline to reopen. The AfD’s parliamentary foreign policy spokesperson, and one of the party’s leading candidates in Baden-Württemberg, used the encounter to argue that Germany should bring back Russian gas and reconsider trade ties with Moscow.

Frohnmaier said the meeting centered on Nord Stream and a full resumption of Russian gas deliveries to Germany. He described Germany’s economy as being in a severe downward spiral because of high energy costs and said all options should be back on the table. The timing and venue were loaded with symbolism: the meeting took place at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, one of the Kremlin’s main annual business events, as Russia continues to use the forum to project openness despite sanctions and isolation over the war in Ukraine.

The political sensitivity in Berlin is hard to miss. Germany’s foreign ministry had explicitly advised the AfD against trips to Russia, yet Frohnmaier went ahead. He was not a marginal figure on the party’s fringe. Elected to the Bundestag in 2017, he sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee and has become one of the AfD’s most prominent foreign-policy voices. At least two AfD Bundestag members, Frohnmaier and Steffen Kotré, were invited to the June forum, underscoring that this was part of a broader outreach to Germany’s far right rather than a solo trip.

The energy backdrop gives the episode real political weight. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia supplied 55% of Germany’s gas imports in 2021, while crude oil and natural gas made up roughly 59% of all German imports from Russia, according to official trade data. Germany halted Nord Stream 2 certification on February 22, 2022, after Russia escalated against Ukraine. Russian gas flows were fully stopped in September 2022, and three of the four Nord Stream pipeline strings were later damaged in explosions that same month.

That infrastructure damage has kept the pipeline at the center of legal and political disputes. German prosecutors later pursued sabotage cases, including arrests of Ukrainian suspects in 2025, and the Nord Stream name remains shorthand in Germany for the collision between prewar dependence on cheap Russian energy and the post-invasion push to cut it off. Frohnmaier’s meeting with Miller and Dmitriev, both under Western sanctions tied to the war, pushed that debate back into the open at a moment when Chancellor Friedrich Merz is again drawing a clear line between mainstream conservatives and the AfD.