Russia halted gas supplies via a major pipeline to Europe on Wednesday, intensifying the economic battle between Moscow and Brussels and raising the prospect of a recession and energy rationing in some of the region’s richest countries.
Come Interruption of flows through Nord Stream 1 For maintenance, it means no gas flows into Germany between 0100 GMT on August 31 and 0100 GMT on September 3, according to Russian energy giant Gazprom.
Data from the pipeline operator’s website showed flows dropped to zero between 0200 and 0300 GMT on Wednesday.
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.
Increased restrictions on European gas supplies would exacerbate an energy crisis that has already sent wholesale gas prices up more than 400% since August last year, causing a painful cost-of-living crisis for consumers, increasing costs for businesses and forcing governments to spend billions to ease the costs of the gas market. 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 cut supplies via Nord Stream 1 to 40% of capacity in June and 20% in July, blaming maintenance problems and sanctions it says prevent equipment and installations from being returned.
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.
