German ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s defence of Russian President Vladimir Putin is “downright absurd,” the current party co-leader Saskia Esken said on Monday.

Mr Esken, therefore, urged him to resign from the Social Democratic Party (SPD) he headed for many years.

Mr Schröder headed the supervisory board of the Russian state energy giant Rosneft and chaired the shareholders’ committee of the pipeline company Nord Stream.

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

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Mr Schröder, chancellor from 1998 to 2005, outright defended the Kremlin leader against accusations of war crimes, in which he said that the order for mass killings likely came from lower-ranking officials, not Mr Putin.

Resigning his mandates with Russian corporations would have been necessary to save his reputation as a former and once-successful chancellor.

But unfortunately, he did not follow this advice, Mr Esken told Deutschlandfunk radio.

“Gerhard Schröder has been acting merely as a businessman for many years, and we should stop perceiving him as an elder statesman, as a former chancellor,’’ Mr Esken said.

“His defence of Vladimir Putin against accusations of war crimes is downright absurd,’’ she added.

She said it would be better for him to resign from the SPD.

(dpa/NAN)