motivated by opponents of the project. They argued that during the construction the seabed will be cleaned, rather than endangered. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed that Russia fully respects the desire for a complete environmental sustainability of the project and that Russia is fully supportive of such an approach, and that all environmental concerns would be addressed in the process of environmental impact assessment. Concerns were raised, since originally Nord Stream AG planned on rinsing out the pipeline with of a solution containing glutaraldehyde, which would be pumped afterward into the Baltic Sea. Nord Stream AG responded that glutaraldehyde would not be used, and even if the chemical were used, the effects would be brief and localized due to the speed with which the chemical breaks down once it comes in contact with water. One of the problems raised was that the Baltic Sea (particularly the Gulf of Finland) remains heavily populated with naval mines. According to the hydrographic survey company Marin Mätteknik, around 85,000 mines were laid during World War I and II, of which only half have been recovered. In November 2008, it was reported that the pipeline would run through old sea mine defense lines, where mines had been previously cleared and their explosive devices had sunk to the seabed. Sunken mines, which were found along the pipeline route, lay primarily in international waters at a depth of more than . Nord Stream AG planned to detonate the mines underwater. Additionally, a lot of munitions have also been dumped into the Baltic Sea. Critics of the pipeline feared that the pipeline would disturb these ammunition dumps. Ethical issues The former Chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schröder, and the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, were strong advocates of the pipeline project during the negotiation phase. International media alluded to a past relationship between the managing director of Nord Stream AG, Matthias Warnig, himself a former East German secret police officer, and Vladimir Putin when he was a KGB agent in East Germany. These allegations were denied by Matthias Warnig, who said that he had met Vladimir Putin for the first time in his life in 1991, when Putin was the head of the Committee for External Relations of the Saint Petersburg Mayor's Office. The agreement to build the pipeline was signed ten days before the German parliamentary election. On 24 October 2005, a few weeks before Schröder had