The German Federal Navigation and Hydrography Agency issued a permit for Nord Stream 2 AG on March 27 to build a 30-kilometer section of the Russian gas pipeline on the Baltic seabed. Previously, Nord Stream 2 AG was authorized to lay a 55-kilometer section of the gas pipeline in Germany's territorial waters and within land borders.
The Nord Stream 2 pipeline may well strip Ukraine of $3 billion each year. Readers of The Ukrainian Times know that the U.S. State Department attempts to prevent construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The reason behind this is that Washington is hell-bent on forcing European countries to buy more liquefied natural gas from the United States and thereby driving the Russian gas group Gazprom out of the European market under the political pretext.
According to Dmitry Marunich, director of the Kiev-based Institute for Energy Studies, the effectiveness of such measures is in questionable taste. "Washington cannot affect the standpoint of certain European Union countries directly," he said.
Gennady Ryabtsev, deputy director of the research and technical center Psychea, thinks the Nord Stream 2 pipeline poses the greatest threat to Poland, not Ukraine. At the same time, the TurkStream gas pipeline is more dangerous for Ukraine. "If Gazprom lays a gas pipeline through the Black Sea, Ukraine would lose advantages in gas transit to southern and central Europe", he noted.
Reportedly, if completed, the $8.6 billion TurkStream pipeline would allow Russia to reduce its reliance on Ukraine as a transit route for its gas supplies to Europe. Moscow wants to ship natural gas by alternative transit routes as much and soon as possible. It is planning to boost capacity of the existing Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany, which together with TurkStream, would remove the need to send any gas via Ukraine.
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