Gazprom headquarters in Moscow (archive picture)
Photo: A2800 epa Ilnitzky / dpa
The energy consumers in Germany have to wait for the announced additional natural gas from Russia.
The Kremlin and state-owned company Gazprom had promised to significantly increase delivery volumes from this week on.
But on Monday little happened at the entry points for two of the three most important Russian pipelines that lead to Germany.
In Mallnow, Brandenburg on the border with Poland, where the Yamal pipeline from Siberia arrives, no Russian natural gas arrived at all by Monday evening.
This is shown by data from the network operator Gascade.
Accordingly, zero gas flowed into Germany on Sunday.
Deliveries via Yamal have been lower than before for days.
At the beginning of last week, there was no gas flow through Mallnow for days;
afterwards, smaller quantities were temporarily moved back and forth between Germany and Poland, said Tom Marzec-Manser chief gas strategist at the London analysis company ISIC.
"It is striking how small the volumes are."
"Nothing special"
Gas does enter Germany via the Transgas pipeline further south, but not significantly more than before.
At the Bavarian-Czech entry point Waidhaus there are "no special features," said a spokeswoman for the operator Open Grid Europe.
"The rivers are not noticeably higher than in the past few days."
Yamal and Transgas are two of the three major gas pipelines that run through Russia to Germany;
the third is Nordstream 1. Gazprom is reliably supplying Europe with large quantities of gas through the first Baltic Sea pipeline.
In contrast, deliveries by Yamal and Transgas fell drastically at the beginning of October - even though prices in European wholesaling are higher than they have been in a long time.
Gazprom fulfills its contractual obligations, but only to the minimum.
The water levels in storage facilities operated by Gazprom companies in Central Europe are much lower than usual at this time of the year.
For months, critics have accused the Russian state-owned company and the Kremlin of deliberately withholding deliveries in order to stir up fears of a bottleneck in the west in order to force the controversial second Baltic Sea pipeline Nordstream 2 to go into operation quickly.
Last week Russia's head of state Vladimir Putin promised the West to deliver more again.
In a televised cabinet meeting, he asked Gazprom boss Alexej Miller in front of the camera to start using the Gazprom storage facilities in Austria and "after the completion of the injection of gas into underground storage facilities in Russia, on November 8 or November 8" Replenish Germany.
On Monday, a spokesman for Putin then declared that Gazprom would deliver more than the agreed mandatory quantities "after November 8th".
How much more gas the Russians want to send to Europe and when exactly remains a nebulae for the time being.
So far there are no signs that the hoped-for gas boost for Europe is imminent.
On the contrary: On Monday afternoon, Gazprom decided not to book additional transport capacities for the Yamal pipeline for Tuesday.
No increased delivery quantities were registered for the Transgas pipeline either.
Nervousness is growing on the market: the wholesale price for gas rose by around 6 percent on the Dutch reference market TTF.