Poland Recalls Hitler-stalin Pact Amid Fears Over Pipeline

Poland accused Germany yesterday of conspiring with Russia to threaten central Europe in a manner that recalled the deal between Hitler and Stalin to carve up Poland before the second world war.

In a bitter attack on German policies towards central Europe, Radek Sikorski, the Polish defence minister, accused Berlin of hypocrisy, advocating common EU foreign, security, and energy policies while failing to consult EU allies.

The target was the deal between Berlin and Moscow last year to bypass eastern and central Europe with a new pipeline under the Baltic Sea linking Russia directly with Germany.

Poland, dependent on Russian power supplies and at odds with its former overlord, fears the pact will let the Kremlin punish its former subjects in central Europe by turning off the energy taps without jeopardising its lucrative and politically important energy supplies to western Europe.

"Poland has a particular sensitivity to corridors and deals above our head," Mr Sikorski told a transatlantic security conference in Brussels. "That was the Molotov-Ribbentrop tradition. That was the 20th century. We don't want any repetition of that," he said.

Mr Sikorski said Poland had asked Chancellor Angela Merkel to review the controversial gas deal. "We asked. She refused," Mr Sikorski said.

Germany and Russia made the deal before last year's German election which the then chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, lost. He has since been given a lucrative post overseeing the project being built by the Russian gas monopoly Gazprom and two large German energy corporations.

Ms Merkel, some of her cabinet, and German industrialists spent most of last week at a summit with the Russians in Siberia and are sticking to the gas pact.

The Poles are the most vocal but far from the only critics of the gas deal, which Warsaw insists is motivated by politics rather than economics since it would be much cheaper to upgrade existing pipelines connecting Russia with western Europe via Belarus and Poland.

Poland's attack was echoed by unusually frank criticism from the Brussels energy commissioner who said the pipeline deal set an unhappy precedent for the EU's bid to coin a common energy plan.