Russian gas giant Gazprom suspended supplies to Austria on Saturday. However, Russia continued to pump steady amounts of gas to Europe through Ukraine. In fact, before the war with Ukraine, Russia was Europe’s largest supplier of natural gas. However, after the war, almost all European countries stopped receiving gas from Russia. The EU has tried to reduce its dependence after the Nord Stream gas pipeline to Germany was blown up in 2022.
Now, the Soviet-era Urengoy-Pommery-Uzhgorod gas pipeline through Ukraine, one of the last major Russian gas routes to Europe, will also close at the end of this year. kyiv does not want to extend the five-year transit agreement that brings gas from northern Siberia to Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Austria.
Austria said on Friday that Russia had informed it that gas supplies would be cut off starting Saturday. Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke to President Vladimir Putin on Friday for the first time in almost two years, as European leaders wait to hear Donald Trump’s ideas for ending Europe’s biggest ground war since World War II.
According to the Kremlin, Putin told Scholz that Russia has always fulfilled its contractual obligations regarding energy supplies and is ready for mutually beneficial cooperation if the German side shows interest. Soviet and post-Soviet leaders built an energy business for more than half a century, beginning with the discovery of significant Siberian gas reserves in the years after World War II, which united the Soviet Union, then Russia and Germany, by far the largest energy producer in Europe. There was a great economy. Wars and explosions have destroyed that bond, damaging the economies of both countries.
Russia once supplied 35% of Europe’s gas, but since the 2022 war, Gazprom has lost market share to Norway, the United States and Qatar. The Yamal-Europe pipeline through Belarus was closed after the dispute, while Russia blamed the United States and Britain for mysterious explosions under the Baltic Sea that closed the Nord Stream route.
After this, Washington and London denied blowing up the pipelines. The Wall Street Journal reported that Ukrainian officials were behind the attack. kyiv has denied this. After the interruption of supplies to Austria, Russian supplies will now go only to two European countries: Hungary and Slovakia. In the case of Hungary, most oil pipelines pass through Türkiye.
According to data collected by Reuters, Russia will ship around 15 billion cubic meters of gas through Ukraine in 2023, representing around 8% of the peak flow of Russian gas to Europe via various routes in 2018-2019. According to the International Energy Agency, in 2023 the Ukrainian transit route will cover 65% of the gas demand of Austria and its eastern neighbors, Hungary and Slovakia.
