Ukraine said Tuesday it would cut off the flow of gas through a transit point that supplies nearly a third of the fuel piped from Russia to Europe via Ukraineand blamed Moscow for the move.
Ukraine it has remained one of the main transit routes for Russian gas to Europe, even after the invasion of Moscow.
GTSOU, which operates the Ukrainian gas system, said it would stop shipments via the Sokhranivka Starting Wednesday, declaring “force majeure,” a clause invoked when a business is affected by something beyond its control.
Gazprom, which has a monopoly on exports of gas in Russian by pipeline, he said it was “technologically impossible” to move all the volumes to the Sudzha interconnection point, further west, as proposed by GTSOU.
The CEO of GTSOUSergiy Makogon told Reuters that Russian occupation forces had started seizing gas transiting Ukraine and shipping it to two Russian-backed breakaway regions in the east of the country, without offering evidence.
The company said it could not operate at the Novopskov gas compression station due to “interference of the occupation forces in technical processes”, adding that it could temporarily transfer the affected flow to the Sudzha physical interconnection point, in territory controlled by Ukraine.
The Novopskov compression station in eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk region has been occupied by Russian forces and separatist fighters since shortly after Moscow launched what it describes as a “special military operation” in February.
It is the first compressor of the Ukrainian gas transit system in the Luhansk region, a transit route for some 32.6 million cubic meters of gas per day, that is, one third of the Russian gas that is transported to Europe through Ukraine , said GTSOU.
GTSOU said that to fulfill its “transit obligations with European partners in full” it would transfer “temporarily unavailable capacity” to the Sudzha interconnection point.
Gazprom He said he had received a notification from Ukraine that the country would stop the transit of gas to Europe through the Sokhranivka interconnector from 07:00 local time on Wednesday.
The Russian company said it saw no evidence of force majeure or obstacles to continuing as before. Gazprom It added that it was fulfilling all its obligations to gas buyers in Europe.
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