Europe faces a worsening supply crisis after Russia announced a halt to gas supplies via a major pipeline to Europe on Wednesday, raising the prospect of a recession and energy rationing in some of the region’s richest countries.
The outage comes via Nord Stream 1 for maintenance. This means that the flow of gas to Germany will be stopped from today until the third of next September, according to what the Russian energy giant “Gazprom” announced.
Nord Stream website said that no large quantities of gas flowed through the pipeline between 3 and 4 am.
Gazprom had announced on Tuesday that it would completely suspend its gas shipments to the French group “Engie”, starting tomorrow, Thursday, as the latter had not paid the full price of the gas shipments it received in July.
The Russian group said in a statement that “Gazprom Export informed Engie to suspend all of its gas shipments as of September 1, 2022, until it receives the full sums due for the shipments.”
Under a decree signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin at the end of March, “Gazprom” clarified that “it is prohibited to deliver additional quantities of natural gas to a foreign buyer if this buyer does not pay the full price within the time limit specified in the contract.”
“Gazprom” confirmed that, until Tuesday evening, it had not received the full amounts due for the July shipments.
European governments fear Moscow will extend the outage in response to Western sanctions imposed over the invasion of Ukraine and have accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of using energy supplies as a “weapon of war”. Moscow denies this.
According to “Reuters”, increasing restrictions on European gas supplies would exacerbate an energy crisis that has already led to a rise in wholesale gas prices by more than 400 percent since August last year, causing a painful cost-of-living crisis for consumers and increasing costs for companies and forcing governments to spend billions to ease the burden.
And unlike last month’s 10-day maintenance of the pipeline, the new maintenance was announced just less than two weeks ago.
Moscow has already reduced supplies via Nord Stream 1 to 40 percent of its capacity in June and to 20 percent in July, blaming maintenance problems and sanctions that don’t allow it to receive equipment it had shipped (to Europe) for maintenance and install them.
Gazprom said the new shutdown is necessary to carry out maintenance on the pipeline’s only remaining compressor.
Russia has completely cut off supplies to Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, and Poland, and reduced flows through other pipelines since launching what Moscow calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine.
