Europe will receive the last Russian gas sent via Ukraine’s pipelines in the early hours of the new year as the continent braces for a plunge in temperatures that could hasten the drain on gas reserves.
The Russian state energy company, Gazprom, is expected to cut off its exports to Europe through Ukraine’s pipelines on New Year’s Day after a gas transit deal struck between the countries five years ago comes to an end overnight.
In the absence of an 11th-hour deal, the halt will mark a historic shift after the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour in early 2022. Russia was once the continent’s biggest supplier of gas but it has lost almost all of its EU customers since the war began, as buyers across central Europe have turned to the US, Norway and Qatar for their supplies.
A combination of cold weather, short daylight hours and weak wind speeds in November – known in German as dunkelflaute – has already pushed Europe to use up more of its winter gas supplies than normal for this time of year as homes fire up their heating and power grids seek to replace wind power with electricity from gas generators.
Nuclear power + heat pumps
the narrative shaping on this instances is so disgusting; the ukrainians are refusing to allow the gas to be shipped and this article and post are meant to make it look like the russians are the ones doing it.
it’s like the “independently operating” ukraining divers who cut off the nord stream pipeline; .worlder’s are being propagandized right here on lemmy and it’s americans themselves accidentally doing it to each other.
Nobody has any illusions that it’s Ukraine cutting off the supply. Weird that you even think that.
Why would they feed the economy of an invading force after the agreement expires? It’s a miracle they left it in place this long.
Actually I did not know it was Ukraine shutting it down. Reading the second paragraph of the article it implies Russia is the party doing the cutting down of delivery.
The Russian state energy company, Gazprom, is expected to cut off its exports to Europe through Ukraine’s pipelines on New Year’s Day after a gas transit deal struck between the countries five years ago comes to an end overnight.
That very clearly means it’s not Ukraine shutting it down.
Though if I were in Zelenskiy’s position, I’d disable every bit of Russian fossil-fuel production and transport that I could. Fuck their balance of payments so hard that they can’t sell anything to anyone.
