“If one considers the close bilateral relations between Germany and Poland, it would not be right to reduce our cooperation within the European Union and NATO exclusively to Nord Stream 2,” Maas told the Warsaw-based Rzeczpospolita daily newspaper ahead of a visit to Poland.

To do so would be to ignore the close and diverse relations between the two countries, he said.

Maas was to meet his Polish counterpart, Zbigniew Rau, in Warsaw on Thursday. For his part, Rau wrote in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily that Russian President Vladimir Putin was setting an “imperial trap” for Germany with the pipeline.

He warned of a security deficit being created on NATO’s eastern flank with the pending completion of the pipeline, which has drawn strident opposition from Ukraine and the United States, as well as Poland, although the US has recently moderated its criticism.