An the bottom of the Baltic Sea, an era may come to an end on Monday. The Nord Stream 1 pipeline is shut down for maintenance. Actually nothing special, it happens like this every year. But now it’s war. Russia has invaded Ukraine, and the West is responding with sanctions. He supplies arms to Ukraine and Russia strikes back. Putin throttles the flow of gas to Europe. The pipeline through Poland has already been shut down, and Russian gas is only flowing at half speed in the pipes through Ukraine and Turkey. Most recently, only one billion cubic meters arrived in the EU every week. A drop of two-thirds. The impact on the EU is immense, and energy prices are higher than ever.
And right now, Nord Stream 1 is being shut down for maintenance. Does anyone think that the line will then go back to the network as normal? Certainly not Minister of Economics Robert Habeck from the Greens. He travels the country with the message: Maybe it’s over. Maybe there’s nothing more. The partners in the coalition take a similar view. Deputy FDP parliamentary group leader Alexander Graf Lambsdorff recalls that cutting off energy supplies is one of Putin’s standard tools of torture. Only recently he blocked the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk for oil exports from Kazakhstan because Kazakhstan does not clearly support its Ukraine war. “The possibility of a shutdown occurring is real,” says Lambsdorff. The SPD is not much more optimistic. To think Nord Stream 1 will restart after the maintenance would be “Russian roulette,” says MP Timon Gremmels, one of the group’s leading energy politicians. When the maintenance is over, one might hear from Moscow: “We’d like to, but because of the sanctions we’re missing important parts, and that’s why we can’t.”