Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor before Angela Merkel, brokered a deal with Vladimir Putin about a gas pipeline linking Germany and Russia a few months before he left his post in 2005. Only a few weeks after Merkel became chancellor, Schröder took a job of coordinating the pipeline project for the Russian monopoly behind it. Germany now imports about forty percent of both natural gas and crude oil from Russia. And this is why the key country in any sort of deal with Putin is Germany. Given that Germany is Europe nowadays, America is sidelined in the current Ukraine crisis. And so is the so-called European Union. Ukraine is squarely between Merkel and Putin. Get it, idiots?