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Pipeline laying company »Fortuna« on the way from Wismar to the Baltic Sea
Photo: Jens Büttner / dpa
Poland has denied allegations that the country's navy is hindering the laying of the pipes for the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea pipeline with provocations.
The Ministry of Defense in Warsaw informed the German Press Agency on March 29 that a navy ship was performing its "legal duty" on the open sea near the pipeline construction.
In doing so, however, the safety margin was maintained and everything went correctly.
Polish Navy planes also performed regular patrol flights over the Baltic Sea.
However, these are in accordance with international regulations and have no intention of interfering in the actions of civil authorities.
The head of a Russian branch of Nord Stream 2 AG had previously complained about the deliberate disruption of construction work by civil and military ships.
"We are talking about clearly planned and prepared provocations through the use of both fishing and military ships, submarines and aircraft with the aim of hindering the implementation of an economic project," said Andrej Minin, Head of Nord Stream Branch in the Leningrad Region of the Tass Agency.
"This is possibly the first and unprecedented case of this kind in history." On March 28, for example, an unmarked submarine appeared less than a mile from the pipe-laying ship "Fortuna".
A day later a Polish Navy warship carried out a maneuver near the "Fortuna".
The Nord Stream 2 pipeline is being built through the Baltic Sea and is intended to transport natural gas from Russia to Germany - bypassing transit countries such as Poland and Ukraine.
The government in Warsaw has long been against this project.
She fears that Russia could thereby increase Europe's dependence on its gas supplies and put the previous transit countries under pressure.
The USA is also against the construction for similar reasons and is threatening further sanctions against the pipeline to prevent its completion.
Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Russian state television on Thursday that oil and gas would never be used as political leverage against Europe.
Lawsuit by the German Environmental Aid
Environmentalists are also up against the construction of the pipeline: Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH) wants to file a lawsuit after rejecting its objection to a building permit.
The Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency (BSH) did not adequately examine nature conservation and climate aspects or even ignored them, the DUH criticized in a statement on Thursday.
The DUH referred, among other things, to climate-damaging methane emissions from the extraction, processing and transport of natural gas.
However, according to its own statements, the BSH is primarily responsible for assessing specific ecological impairments at sea and the effects on shipping traffic.
It had justified the rejection of the contradictions, among other things, with the fact that the remaining construction section only runs on the edge of a bird sanctuary, with little significance for certain species of roosting birds.
In addition, the pipeline partially runs through an area in which there is already intensive shipping traffic
oka / dpa