BERLIN, May 2 (UPI) -- German politicians are angry at a Polish minister who compared a German-Russian pipeline project to an old pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Poland's Defense Minister Radek Sikorski said Sunday in Brussels that the plan to link Germany and Russia directly with a pipeline under the Baltic Sea was like the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, when Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin divided up Poland between them.
The non-aggression treaty was named after the countries' two foreign ministers at the time, Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop, who signed it.
"Such an absurd comparison hurts German-Polish relations," Ruprecht Polenz, a foreign policy expert of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Chistian Democrat Union, told Tuesday's Bild newspaper.
Hans-Ulrich Klose, a foreign policy expert of the Social Democrat Party, called on Sikorski to "take back his statement as fast as possible."
Under a deal struck between former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Berlin and Moscow have agreed to build an underwater pipeline linking a Siberian gas field directly to Germany, bypassing transit countries in Eastern Europe, including Poland.
Warsaw from the first moment has acted as the project's most vocal critic. Merkel has so far not commented on the statement.
