US Senators Urge Sanctions against NS2
US senators wrote to the government March 15 appealing for the application of sanctions in an effort to oppose Nord Stream 2, Ukrainian monopoly Naftogaz said March 20. They referred to the growing danger of Russia’s monopoly on the European Union’s energy market.
The legislators said Gazprom’s development of infrastructure projects in Europe had become an extension of Russia’s aggressive foreign policy and they urged the US government to apply its sanctions more broadly to halt NS2.
They say that Article 232 of the sanctions law gives the government "an additional instrument to define US and foreign legal entities who are supporting the the extension of Gazprom Group’s almost monopolistic role in deliveries of energy to US allies."
“It is obvious that the Kremlin uses Gazprom to exert political pressure and sow discord among the governments of sovereign European states, which is inadmissible behaviour,” they said.
While western European countries, particularly Germany, are broadly supportive of the use of private money to build a pipeline, those in the east – particularly Poland – view it differently.
Russia is trying to use this influence to disturb the transatlantic balance, while the sanctions are intended to force Russia to stop its unlawful warfare in Ukraine and to adhere to the Minsk Accords, they said, rather than violating them as it does now.
They said that this year will be a decisive one for NS2: “We must show our European allies that we decisively support their energy independence and that NS2 negatively affects their long-term interests." Building has to start soon if the 2019 start-date is to be achieved, but Gazprom still does not know whether or not it will be allowed to follow the route of the already-operational 55bn m³/yr NS1 through Danish waters.
The US senators also said NS2 would be a threat to the economies of central and eastern Europe which have relied on transit fees.
Naftogaz CEO Andriy Kobolev expressed his gratitude to the senators and other interested politicians "who do not fear to oppose the growing pressure of Russia’s aggressive foreign policy, one element of which is NS2." He said Ukraine had a lot of experience dealing with such unpredictable partners as Gazprom which had repeatedly stopped gas deliveries for political reasons.
In late January 2018, the US published a 'watch list' of 210 prominent allies of Putin - including the heads of Gazprom, Rosneft, Novatek and Sakhalin Energy - but did not impose any fresh sanctions on them.
Gazprom has said it only stops gas supplies when it is not paid for gas, or when there are commercial grounds. Last year, Naftogaz employed lobbygroup Yorktown to represent its interests in US political circles. Kobolev himself visited Washington in December.
Separately, British daily The Times reported March 20 that Germany's re-installed chancellor, Angela Merkel, said that EU countries had to discuss the pipeline in the light of the attempted murder in Salisbury mid-March of double-agent Sergei Skripal. Germany, UK, France and the US said that there were no plausible alternatives to Russia as the cause of is death. Since then, another exiled opponent of newly-re-elected president Vladimir Putin, has been killed: Nikolai Glushkov, a former deputy director of state airline Aeroflot, was an ally of the late businessmen Boris Berezovsky who helped Putin's meteoric rise but then turned against him and left Russia to live in the UK.
The Observer reported March 18 that UK infrastructure operators, major financial institutions and water and energy suppliers were on maximum alert against the threat of a cyber attack from Moscow, following the murder of Glushkov. Intelligence officials referred to Notpetya ransomware cyber attack on Ukraine that targeted finance and energy. The National Cyber Security Centre was working with them to assess the next move, the report said.