MOSCOW (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday it was now clear that there would be no new gas transit deal with Kyiv to send Russian gas through Ukraine to Europe, but that Russia would survive.
Russia, which before the Ukraine war was the biggest single supplier of natural gas to Europe, has lost almost all of its European customers as the EU tries to reduce its dependence on Moscow.
The Nord Stream pipeline to Germany, which was blown up in 2022, also severed a major artery for Russian gas exports.
Now one of the last main Russian gas routes to Europe – the Soviet-era Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod pipeline via Ukraine – is due to shut at the end of this year as Kyiv does not want to extend a five-year transit agreement which brings northern Siberian gas to Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Austria.
“There will not be a contract – that is clear,” Putin said of the expiring deal, adding that Ukraine was thus shutting off Russian gas supplies to Europe.
“Okay, we will cope – and Gazprom will cope,” he said.
Soviet and post-Soviet leaders spent half a century from the discovery of major Siberian gas deposits in the years after World War Two building up an energy business which linked the Soviet Union and then Russia, with Germany, by far Europe’s biggest economy.
At its peak, Russia was supplying 35% of Europe’s gas. Since the Ukraine war started in 2022, Gazprom has lost market share to Norway, the United States and Qatar.
Putin said that Western sanctions against Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) were an attempt to shield the West’s own suppliers from competition.
Western sanctions were causing problems, he said, but Russia would endure.
(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin and Oksana Kobzeva; Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
