Director of Gazprom’s subsidiary Nord Stream 2 Matthias Varnig, who is considered a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, revealed the details of the conversation with him after the start of the war in Ukraine.
Shortly before the war, Varnig saw Putin, and he seemed to him “rationally thinking.” Therefore, the director of Nord Stream 2 was indignant and ridiculed the warnings about the possible invasion of Russia to Ukraine – even a few days before the start of the war.
A couple of months after the Russian attack on Ukraine, Varnig met with Putin in Moscow. He claims that talking alone in German, he tried to convince the President of the Russian Federation to stop the war. Varnig recalls the question that he asked the Russian leader: “What are your goals? You are talking about Donetsk and Lugansk, at the same time your troops want to take Kyiv. How does it correlate? Do you need Odessa, Kharkov or all of Ukraine? Or even more?” In response, Putin, according to Varnig, only said: “This is a state of guest.”
In that conversation, the Russian President also suggested Varniga with his family to move to Moscow. “We will find something here for you,” the director of Nord Stream 2. But Matthias Varnig, refused the sentence: “I have to live behind high fences?”, He said.