Gazprom will restart gas flows from Nord Stream 1 as planned – sources | Photo credits: © Gazprom
MOSCOW, Sept 2 (Reuters) – Gazprom is expected to resume gas deliveries to Germany via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline as planned on Saturday after a three-day shutdown for maintenance, two sources close to the giant said on Friday. Russian Energy.
Nord Stream 1, which runs under the Baltic Sea to connect Russia with Germany and other western European countries, was operating at 20% capacity before the shutdown on Thursday.
Deliveries are supposed to resume at 01:00 GMT on Saturday.
“Supply should work” as expected, one of the sources told Reuters.
Moscow claims that the Western sanctions taken against it since the sending of troops to Ukraine at the end of February are disrupting the operation of Nord Stream 1 and its maintenance operations, but Brussels sees this only as a pretext and accuses Russia of using gas as an economic “weapon of war”.
Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for the Kremlin, said on Friday that the reliability of Nord Stream 1 was compromised by the lack of resources, assuring that “it is not the fault of Gazprom”.
(Reuters report, French version Marc Angrand, edited by Sophie Louet)