Ukrainian President: Nord Stream is Kremlin’s Trojan horse to European energy security
President Petro Poroshenko believes that the Russian gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 is Kremlin’s Trojan horse to the European energy and geopolitical security.
“The refusal to implement the project within the Third Energy Package of the EU and Gazprom’s and intentional failure to carry out decisions of the Stockholm Arbitration Court on Ukraine’s cases are clear and unambiguous signals of the true meaning of the pipeline and its potentially catastrophic consequences for the European Union,” Poroshenko wrote on his Facebook page.
The Ukrainian President of Ukraine urged European partners “to get rid of deceptive and detrimental Kremlin’s charm as soon as possible and strongly defend their own energy security.”
Nord Stream 2 project consist of two gas lines. Total capacity of the two lines is 55 billion cubic meters of gas per year from the Russian coast through the Baltic Sea to Germany. Earlier, the head of Gazprom, Alexei Miller, said that the gas transit through Ukraine would decrease tenfold after the construction of the Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream. Now Ukraine receives about $ 3 billion a year from the transit of Russian gas.
In May, at a press conference with Angela Merkel, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia has no plan to stop gas transit through Ukraine after Nord Stream 2 will start its work. Then he added that the supplies will continue if they’re “economically justified for all participants.”
At a meeting with US President Donald Trump, Putin promised again to keep the gas transit through Ukraine.
It was reported that the USA is preparing sanctions against the participants of the Nord Stream 2. Ukraine, the Baltic countries, and Poland oppose the construction of the pipeline.