EU Pipeline Ruling Helps Ukraine Thwart Russia
Putin wants to use the natural gas transmission system to squeeze the Ukrainian government. A European court just made that harder.
The politics of gas.
Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/BloombergA European Union court has undermined Russia’s strategic plan to eliminate its dependence on Ukraine for the transit of its natural gas exports to Europe. That’s another stroke of luck for Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy: Now he has a much stronger position in trilateral gas talks with Russia and the EU, due to take place later this month. And no long-threatened U.S. sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 project expanding the capacity of pipelines beneath the Baltic Sea were required to achieve this important result.
The EU General Court in Luxembourg on Tuesday overruled a 2016 European Commission decision allowing the Russian natural gas exporter Gazprom PJSC to use more than 50% of the capacity of the OPAL pipeline, which runs from Lubmin in North Germany to Olbernhau near the German-Czech border. OPAL is an onshore extension of Nord Stream 1, the Russian pipeline laid across the bottom of the Baltic Sea, finished in 2012. Last year, Nord Stream 1 delivered 58.8 billion cubic meters of gas to Germany, more than its nominal capacity of 55 billion cubic meters and about 29% of Russia’s gas exports to Europe.