Under pressure for days because of its support deemed too hesitant to Ukraine, Berlin has reaffirmed its ambition to put an end, in the short term, to its energy dependence on Russian hydrocarbons. On a visit to Riga on Wednesday 20 April to meet counterparts from the Baltic States, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock promised that, by the end of the year, Germany “would be done with Russian oil”.
“I say it clearly here: yes, Germany too is ready to do without Russian energy imports,” she said, acknowledging “big mistakes” that his country had committed in its policy towards Moscow in recent years. She claimed that the Baltic Sea gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 had been a ” fatal error “. Concretely, Germany plans to halve its imports of Russian oil by the summer, and to put an end to it at the end of the year. Annalena Baerbock added that the gas embargo would follow, “in a common European roadmap”, without giving more details on the deadline. So far, the Ministry of the Economy has mentioned a complete exit by the summer of 2024.
Admittedly, this is not the first time that the government has mentioned the end of 2022 for independence from Russian oil. On March 25, the Minister of the Economy, Robert Habeck, had already presented a similar agenda. But the procrastination of the government has since cast such doubt on Berlin’s desire to intensify pressure on Moscow that this reaffirmation of the timetable seemed highly necessary.
heavy infrastructure
Russia currently provides 35% of Germany’s oil supply. Behind this figure hides a heavy infrastructure, inherited from history: two-thirds of Russian oil imported by Germany arrives via a pipeline called “Droujba”, “friendship” in Russian. For sixty years, this pipeline, which crosses Belarus and Poland, has supplied crude oil to the refineries of Schwedt-sur-l’Oder, in the Brandenburg region, and Leuna, in Saxony-Anhalt. These two sites produce the gasoline, diesel, heating oil and kerosene used throughout eastern Germany.
The Leuna refinery is operated by the Total group, which announced in March that it had changed its contracts, so that oil imports from Russia have halved since mid-April. And the end of all delivery relations with Russia is scheduled for the end of 2022. The Schwedt-sur-l’Oder refinery, on the other hand, poses a much more serious problem: it is 92% owned… to the Russian state group Rosneft. “We are paying a high price here for the fact that, despite the war in Crimea, a Russian group was allowed to take such a decisive influence in the energy supply”lamented the Ministry of the Economy at the end of March.
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