Schröder Travels to Moscow to Celebrate Putin's Birthday and Joins Russian Retail Supervisory Board — The Network of Political Ties Behind Sanctions Against Russia Continues

According to Deutsche Welle reporting, German former chancellor Gerhard Schröder traveled to Moscow this week to attend Russian President Vladimir Putin's 74th birthday party. The Kremlin released images of the two shaking hands and smiling, and summarized the private meeting in a single sentence: "The president invited his old friend to his home as a guest."

The trip by the 82-year-old Schröder was not limited to birthday celebrations. According to Deutsche Welle reporting, Schröder joined the supervisory board of Russian supermarket chain Hyperglobus last week. The enterprise was spun off from German retail group Globus Holding — after the latter divested its Russian stores last year, those stores have been operating independently under the Hyperglobus name. During his visit to Russia, Schröder toured a Hyperglobus store.

Schröder served as German chancellor from 1998 to 2005 and is a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Since leaving office, he has long worked for Russian state-owned energy companies and maintained a personal relationship with Putin. This trajectory has sparked continuing controversy since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Deutsche Welle reported that Schröder's taxpayer-funded office in Berlin was closed in 2022 due to his involvement in the Russian energy industry; within the SPD there were once calls to expel him from the party, but Schröder ultimately retained his membership.

The timing of Schröder's latest moves is telling. Against the backdrop of the Ukraine war entering its fourth year and the EU continuing to discuss stepping up pressure on Russia, the German former chancellor's appearance at a Russian retail enterprise as a supervisory board member, and his invitation to the private birthday party of the Kremlin's host, was described by Deutsche Welle as "standing in contrast to the high tension in Germany's relations with Russia."

From a policy framework perspective, Germany has played a key role in the EU's sanctions system against Russia since 2022, voicing solidarity with Ukraine and adopting "a rules-based international order" as the core of its diplomatic language. Yet Schröder's trajectory — from executive at Russian state-owned energy companies to now formally joining the supervisory board of a Russian retail enterprise — points to a clear gap between the symbolic meaning of Germany's Russia policy and the network structures that its own political elites have built up in the Russian economy over decades. Sanctions measures constrain businesses, trade, and financial flows; the positions of former political leaders on Russian boards and in personal relationships are not on any sanctions list.

The Kremlin's publication of photos and messaging about Schröder's visit to Russia itself constitutes a signal: at a time when the EU is pushing a new round of pressure on Russia, the Russian side is still able, through the channel of a former German chancellor, to directly access the political personal networks within the EU's largest economy. Whether passively received or actively shaped, such contacts remind people that the tension between the two logics in Western Russia policy — "punishing the Kremlin" and "maintaining ties to Russia" — has not disappeared because of the war.