By Vladimir Soldatkin and Guy Faulconbridge
MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia halted gas supplies to Austria on Saturday over a dispute over payments, but still pumped steady volumes to Europe via Ukraine after remaining buyers requested more gas.
Russia, which was the largest supplier of natural gas to Europe before the war in Ukraine, has lost almost all its European customers as the EU tries to reduce its dependence and after the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany was blown up in 2022.
Now one of the last major Russian gas routes to Europe – the Soviet-era Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod pipeline via Ukraine – will close at the end of this year as Kiev does not want to renew a five-year transit deal. brings North Siberian gas to Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Austria.
Austria said on Friday that Moscow had informed the country that gas would be cut off following an arbitration award to OMV, Austria’s largest energy supplier, over unfulfilled deliveries to its German unit by Russian state-owned Gazprom.
On Saturday, Austrian energy regulator E-Control said deliveries from Gazprom to OMV had stopped at 6 a.m. (0500 GMT), adding that prices and deliveries to Austrian customers were stable.
OMV is seeking to recover the 230 million euros ($242 million) in damages awarded during the arbitration from Gazprom by offsetting the claim against invoices for supplies to Austria, effectively halting some payments for gas supplied through Ukraine.
Gazprom declined to comment on the suspension of flows to Austria, but the Russian company said it would send 42.4 million cubic meters of gas to Europe via Ukraine on Saturday, the same volume as on Friday and every other day in recent months .
Slovakia’s state-owned company SPP said it was still receiving gas from Russia, adding that others were buying more.
“The situation in which a major consumer stopped purchasing gas from the east, but the same volume flows through the territory of Ukraine, shows that there is still great interest in this gas in Europe,” SPP said in a statement, without the to name the other buyers. .
OMV is generally responsible for about 40% of Russian gas flows through Ukraine, or about 17 million cubic meters per day.
Austrian grid operator AGGM said it is currently not replacing imports from Germany or Italy. Austria previously said it has sufficient supplies to cover the shortfall.
GAS POLITICS
Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke to President Vladimir Putin for the first time in almost two years on Friday, as European leaders await Donald Trump’s ideas on ending Europe’s biggest land war since World War II.
According to the Kremlin, Putin told Scholz that Russia had always fulfilled its contractual obligations in the field of energy supplies and was “ready for mutually beneficial cooperation if the German side shows interest in it.”
From the discovery of vast Siberian gas deposits in the years after World War II, Soviet and post-Soviet leaders spent half a century building an energy business that powered the Soviet Union, then Russia and Germany, by far Europe’s largest economy, with connected each other.
War and explosions have destroyed that connection, damaging the economies of both countries.
At its peak, Russia supplied 35% of Europe’s gas, but since the start of the war in 2022, Gazprom has lost market share to Norway, the United States and Qatar.
The Yamal-Europe pipeline via Belarus was closed after a dispute, while Russia blamed the United States and Britain for the explosions under the Baltic Sea that closed the Nord Stream route.
Washington and London have denied blowing up the pipelines. According to The Wall Street Journal, Ukrainian officials were behind the attack. Kiev has denied this.
Without Austria, significant Russian supplies will only go to two European countries, Hungary and Slovakia, in Hungary’s case via a pipeline that runs largely through Turkey.
Russia shipped about 15 billion cubic meters of gas through Ukraine in 2023, about 8% of the peak of Russian gas flows to Europe via various routes in 2018-2019, according to data collected by Reuters.
Ukraine’s transit route met 65% of gas demand in Austria and its eastern neighbors Hungary and Slovakia by 2023, according to the International Energy Agency.
($1 = 0.9487 euros)
(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin and Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow, Thomas Escritt in Berlin, Jason Hovet in Prague; Editing by Frances Kerry, Kirsten Donovan and David Holmes)
