Berlin, Sept. 5, (dpa/GNA) - Berlin and Moscow traded blame on Sunday for the halting of gas flows through the Nord Stream 1 Baltic Sea pipeline between the two countries the day after Russia failed to turn the taps back on after a planned period of maintenance ended.
“[Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s Russia has broken its contracts,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said, and has not been fulfilling its supply commitments for some time now: “Russia is no longer a reliable supplier of energy.”
For its part, the Kremlin blamed the EU for the suspension of gas deliveries via Nord Stream 1, news agency Interfax reported on Sunday.
Speaking in a television broadcast titled “Moscow. Kremlin. Putin.,” Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov said: “If the Europeans make an absolutely absurd decision, where they refuse to maintain their systems, or rather, systems belonging to Gazprom, then it is not Gazprom’s fault but the fault of the politicians who decided about the sanctions.”
According to Peskov, Europeans are contractually obliged to maintain the systems of the Russian energy giant Gazprom.
Gazprom had announced on Friday evening that it would no longer send natural gas to Germany through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, citing an oil leak in a compressor station.
The German government has questioned the reasoning, along with pipeline manufacturer Siemens, arguing that such oil leaks are fairly routine and do not require gas deliveries to stop.
Putin is to blame for the difficult economic situation facing Germany, said Scholz on Sunday as he announced a new cost-of-living support package.
Flows of gas from Russian state-owned energy company Gazprom have been slashed well below agreed-upon rates in recent months.
Scholz said that death and destruction in Ukraine are the most serious consequences of Putin’s war, but also expressed his empathy with German residents worried about rising prices. “The cause of this very, very difficult situation is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” he said.
However, Scholz also struck an optimistic note, saying, “We will make it through the winter,” not least because of ongoing, long-running preparations.
Meanhile, opposition Christian Democrat (CDU) party leader Friedrich Merz warned of a power supply blackout in winter if Germany sticks to its plans to phase out its last remaining nuclear power plants by the end of the year.
“There is a threat of a complete overload of the electricity grid in the autumn and winter, as well as an inadequate supply of electricity,” Merz told the Sunday edition of the mass-circulation newspaper Bild.
If only every fifth gas customer heats with electricity this winter, the electricity demand from private households will double, Merz said. “If this government continues like this and sticks to the nuclear phase-out for ideological reasons, we are threatened with a blackout at the beginning of next year.”
Scholz said in the summer interview with public broadcaster ZDF on Sunday that the government had done everything to ensure that there would not be a “blackout,” in comments seen in advance by dpa. “I am very sure that we will be spared that,” the chancellor said.
To ensure power supply, he said, the government had ensured, for example, that coal-fired power plants were brought out of standby to produce electricity. In this way, gas could be saved, he said.
Merz demanded that new fuel rods be ordered for the continued operation of at least the three nuclear power plants in Germany that have not yet been shut down:
“We would have made sure by August at the latest that new fuel rods would have been ordered at least for the three nuclear power plants that are still running, possibly also for the three that were shut down last year. This would have provided a total of 20 million households with a secure supply of electricity for the time being.”
On Sunday the German Economy Ministry tweeted that gas storage units across the country had exceeded the level of 85% storage capacity.
The government had planned to reach the threshold of 85% by October 1, with a goal of reaching 95% of capacity by November 1.
Gas imports from Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands currently make up more than the amounts being sent through Nord Stream 1 even before supply was suspended altogether.
GNA