Our main difficulty was that, in contrast to the United States, Europe had a smattering of political factions that were nakedly pro-Putin, and they had infected the mainstream debate. In France, for example, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front party, openly took millions of euros from a Kremlin-connected bank to fund her political party. In return, it appeared that she supported most of Putin’s anti-Western policies. In Germany, former chancellor Gerhard Schröder had taken a lucrative position at a subsidiary of Gazprom, the Russian gas behemoth, almost the moment he left
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