The European Union said on Wednesday that the two gas pipelines linking Russia and Germany had been attacked, and vowed to react. “Any deliberate disruption of European energy infrastructure will meet with a united and robust response,” said the bloc’s chief diplomat, Josep Borrell.
The Kremlin has criticized suspicions raised by Western officials, none of them in public, that the Russians were behind the explosions off the Danish coast at the twin Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines.
“This is stupid and predictable,” said spokesman Dmitri Peskov. Her counterpart at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, hinted that the United States could be behind the action when she posted on Telegram a pre-Ukrainian War video with an interview with President Joe Biden.
In it, he says that if the Russians invade their neighbor, “there will be no Nord Stream 2”. The reporter insists it’s not an American project and Biden retorts, “I promise you, we can do it.” Zakharova then questions whether the president will now explain whether or not he attacked the pipelines.
It is rhetorical, since Biden was probably talking about the economic pressure that he could bring about through sanctions on Germany, as his predecessor Donald Trump had already done to try to derail the energy project that was the darling of the Angela Merkel government. But it shows the tension level of the situation.
Borrell also did not specify who was behind the two underwater explosions in the Baltic Sea that affected the branches. Nord Stream 1 was operating at low capacity for what the Kremlin said was a technical problem and the Europeans, political pressure due to the war sanctions, and its brother was never commercially deployed, but was loaded with gas to maintain the system. ready to be used.
The governments of Sweden, Denmark and Germany say they are working on the sabotage hypothesis, but are careful not to point blame just yet. Stockholm went further, reiterating that it does not consider the attack an act against their country, to lower tensions – the Swedes are, alongside the Finns, in the process of joining NATO (a US-led military alliance) due to the conflict in Ukraine.
“We will support all investigations to have complete clarity on what happened and why, and we will take additional steps to increase our resilience in energy security,” Borrell said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the actual damage to the system is being assessed. In Germany, the Tagesspiegel newspaper said the government’s unofficial assessment was that the damage could be permanent.
The Nord Stream system began operating in 2011, in the form of a multinational consortium led by Russian state-owned Gazprom. For Germany, it was a way to secure cheaper Russian gas, through the longest underwater pipelines ever created by man, 1,200 km long.
For Putin, it was the opportunity to seal the strategic partnership with a Europe dependent on his product, and to progressively remove its flow through the two Soviet gas pipelines that pass through Ukraine, which are still operating despite the war. They had an ace up their sleeve for Kiev, plus about $3 billion a year in tolls.
The episode further heightens European fears of a difficult winter ahead. The continent has been trying to access alternative sources of gas, but this is a long-term process. Prices are already up to ten times higher than the decade average, and governments fear popular dissatisfaction as homes could be left without heat and industries without power.
The US and European Union thus accuse Putin of weaponizing gas, as he counts on pressure to reduce continental support for Ukrainians in the war.
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