Schröder, who was chancellor of Germany between 1998 and 2005, heads the supervisory board of the Russian state energy giant Rosneft and chairs the shareholders’ committee of the pipeline company Nord Stream.

He has failed to offer any criticism of Putin in the wake of his country’s invasion of Ukraine.

Schröder “belongs on the sanctions list of Putin profiteers,” Moritz Körner, a leading member of the pro-business FDP, told the Handelsblatt newspaper on Wednesday, adding that the former chancellor was Putin’s most important man in Germany.

Roderich Kiesewetter, a foreign policy expert from the conservative CDU, also called for sanctions.

“The fact that Schröder still does not distance himself from Putin and Russia only shows how deeply he is in Putin’s service,” he said.

Reinhard Bütikofer of the Greens called for sanctions on Schröder and other former European politicians “who have since sold out to Vladimir Putin.”

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Schröder outright defended the head of the Kremlin against accusations of war crimes, saying that the order for mass killings had likely come from lower-ranking officials, not Putin.