The European gas battle continues

HUNGARY - In Brief 03 Oct 2022 by Istvan Racz

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President Biden was right: should Russia invade Ukraine, the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline would not work at all. For sure, Nordstream 1 and 2 were made inoperable for a very long time, and possibly forever, by a series of blasts observed on September 26-27. Politically, this has removed the option for Germany and the EU to put these pipelines back to operation simply by backing away from anti-Russia sanctions if the energy situation gets intolerable during the coming winter. It has also removed an important element of Russia's blackmailing potential vis-a-vis Germany and the EU. Immediately, this incident did not do anything to the European gas market, as since the start of September, there had not been any gas shipments flowing through Nordstream 1, the only part of the system ever used in practice. But a number of other things have happened most lately, which point in the direction of Russian gas shipments to Europe becoming increasing scarce and troubled, most likely on the basis of political considerations, which are usually disguised as technical factors. Last week, Gazprom threatened to stop gas shipments through Ukraine to Slovakia and further to the west, because of its lack of understanding with the Ukrainian transporter, the company in control of the Ukrainian section of the last-but-one pipeline connection, through which Russian gas is actually still being supplied to the EU. A few days later, Gazprom entirely stopped shipping gas to Italian ENI, referring to the Austrian transporter failing to provide technical data required to continue shipments. Italy, the second largest user of gas within the EU, used to import some 29 bcm of natural gas from Russia before ...