Kremlin puts pressure on gas: “Historically low level” - Is the conflict in Russia now escalating?
Created: 12/23/2021, 09:32 AM
From: Marcus Mäckler
Russian President Vladimir Putin sits on the gas tap - and turns it off a little.
© ITAR-TASS / Imago
The gas storage facilities are only moderately full and prices are rising.
Now, of all times, Russia is stopping parts of the delivery and pumping gas back to Poland.
Does Moscow want to put pressure on the West?
Munich - Olaf Scholz recently said a sentence that sounded like time travel. Nord Stream 2 is a "private-sector project", the Chancellor declared at the end of last week. His predecessor Angela Merkel saw it the same way for a long time, but at the end of her term in office she recognized the geopolitical dimension of the controversial pipeline. An important step. The current backflip is all the more irritating.
Not only Scholz 'green coalition partners but also many observers doubt that gas would be apolitical for the Kremlin.
In recent months there have been repeated signals that Russian President Vladimir Putin is using the existing pipelines to put pressure on Europe.
It was not until Tuesday that the state-owned company Gazprom stopped its deliveries via the Yamal pipeline, which leads via Belarus and Poland to Mallnow in Brandenburg.
At times gas was even pumped back to Poland.
That was already the case at the beginning of November.
Russia is pumping gas back to Poland - German gas storage facilities are only 56 percent full
This puts Europe - and Germany in particular - in an awkward position. According to the industry association Gas Infrastructure Europe (GIE), German gas storage facilities are currently only 56 percent full; in the previous year it was over 80 percent. The managing director of the Energy Storage Initiative (INES), Sebastian Bleschke,
recently
spoke in the
world
of a "historically low level
at the beginning of
winter".
The Kremlin takes every opportunity to deny using its gas supplies as a political instrument.
In the case of the Jamal delivery freeze, a spokesman said it was a purely economic decision.
Russia analyst Stefan Meister from the German Society for Foreign Policy (DGAP) expressly sees it differently.
"Energy policy is part of Russian foreign and security policy," he told our newspaper.
"You can't separate it."
Ukraine, Tiergarten and Nord Stream 2: Russia stops gas supplies at politically sensitive times
The delivery stop is noticeable in any case, because it comes at a politically sensitive time.
Relations between Moscow and the West are more tense than they have been for a long time: Fear of war on the Ukrainian border, the struggle to get Nord Stream 2 operational and, more recently, diplomatic turmoil between Moscow and Berlin.
The verdict in the Tiergarten murder trial irritated the Kremlin.
Berlin expelled two Russian embassy employees, Moscow responded and declared two German diplomats undesirable.
In a showdown of strength, Putin apparently feels superior at the moment and the gas emergency in Europe seems to be the moment to push through his political demands.
The Innsbruck political scientist Gerhard Mangott recently said that Russia is "extortionate".
Russia: Are there political intentions behind the gas supplier?
Stefan Meister also assumes clear political intentions with a view to the recent delivery stop on the Yamal pipeline.
In addition to Nord Stream 2, Russia also has Ukraine and the stop of a possible NATO eastward expansion in view.
"The Russian leadership is building up maximum negotiating pressure here at various points, and this also seems to be the case in the energy sector."
After all: we still talk to each other.
On Tuesday evening (December 21), Putin spoke to Olaf Scholz on the phone for the first time.
On the occasion, the Kremlin said he had demanded “serious negotiations” from the Chancellor on far-reaching security guarantees from the USA and NATO.
Scholz addressed the deployment of troops on the border with Ukraine and emphasized the “need for de-escalation”.
It is not known whether the gas was also an issue.
(mmä)
